As part of Aftermath's article, reviewer Isaiah Colbert remarked that the manga had had its "announcement treated like a Klan rally in the comments and quote-retweets of its English localization on Twitter". I was, sadly, unsurprised to hear this. But I'm not entirely sure why I did what I did next.

I found an old, defunct Twitter account that I once had that is still active, and I logged into Twitter to have a look. I haven't even looked at Twitter for months at this point; even while I was doing social media for the day job, I spent as little time on there as possible. The whole place just had seriously bad vibes for quite some time now, but I didn't stick around to find out quite how bad. And part of the reason I deliberately stepped away from social media for my work at the day job is because I didn't want to expose myself to that crap at all, let alone "any more than necessary".

Today, I confirmed: things are bad. They're real bad. We're talking blatant, unashamed, absolutely fucking disgusting racism, without even any attempts at plausible deniability. We're talking racist slurs in response to the post; we're talking edits of the cover image to turn it into a racist caricature; we're talking, inexplicably, a lot of antisemitism.

I feel like it takes a fair amount to shock me these days, given how many years I have breathed Internet fumes for, but today I was genuinely taken aback and disgusted by what that site has become. I have no regrets about jumping ship long before it got this bad — and now I have a complete understanding of anyone who has harsh words for those who stick around on the site at all.

The entire place has become a free-for-all cesspit filled with the absolute worst dregs of humanity, all of them feeling safe in the knowledge that they will see zero repercussions for their foul behaviour. Indeed, in the quote-tweets thread for the post in question, one user noted that they reported one of the racist caricatures to Twitter's laughable "safety" department, and got told that the post had, somehow, not broken any rules. At this point I'm not entirely sure Twitter has a safety department any more; there's a non-zero chance that a lot of moderation is left up to Grok, and given that Grok has proven itself to be quite happy to produce child sexual abuse material with minimal encouragement, that makes me feel like it's probably not going to be a good judge of whether something is racist or not.

It's kind of incredible how this has happened. Twitter was once, genuinely, the "town square" of the Internet. It was the "default" social media app for everything. TV shows had official hashtags. Brands had active presences. People actively wanted to be on there to be part of the conversation. And while it's always had its issues and its bad actors, for the most part the truly odious individuals were corralled off into their own little corners rather than being people you will almost definitely run into if you poke your head in there for more than five minutes.

It is no longer a safe place to hang out online. Everything that has happened on that site in the last few years has corrupted it into an utterly disgusting shadow of its former self. And Musk still wants to make it "The Everything App"? He wants people to trust a site like that with their money?

I don't know why I looked at Twitter tonight. I had no need to. But I guess I was curious quite how bad it had actually gotten since I last looked a long time ago; whether the things people had said about it were real, or if they were exaggerations.

They were not exaggerations. Get off that fucking platform if you're still on it.

And no, I will not call it "X".

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The post #oneaday Day 802: However bad you think Twitter is now, it's worse appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I mean, sure. I won't deny that my various dalliances with social media — particularly the "public-facing" kind such as Twitter (as it was before… what it is now) and Bluesky — have exposed me to people I might not have otherwise had the opportunity to get to know, and even allowed me to make some friends… I think, anyway.

But sometimes I find myself wondering if there's a reason I might not have come into contact with certain types of people were it not for the "global town square" nature of public-facing social media. I am starting to feel, looking at my Bluesky feed, like I felt when I first fell out of love with Twitter. It feels less about the conversation, sharing and making new friends, and more about performatively saying the right things in order to ensure that you are seen as a "good person" with the "correct" opinions. And I'm really fuckin' tired of that shit.

I won't go into specific examples right now, because that will date this post immediately — plus I'm not altogether keen in getting embroiled in the current "discussions", however indirectly — but suffice it to say for the moment that as soon as you start feeling genuine trepidation about saying certain things, lest the Mob pounce on you for something you might not have actually intended from what you said, then that's the time you should probably start thinking about how you are using social media, and how you might be able to make it better for yourself.

The simple answer is, of course, mute, unfollow or even block the people who are making you feel that way. On Bluesky in particular, the "nuclear block" function means that it is hard (though not impossible) for anyone you have blocked to check up on what you are saying. But on the other hand, I feel like blocking sends a certain message that perhaps isn't exactly what you intend; there's an inherent message of disapproval to it that might not be what you want to say; the same is true for unfollowing, to an arguably slightly lesser extent.

Probably the subtlest approach you can take is just to mute someone who is irritating you, but who you don't particularly want to send that message of disapproval to by blocking them. No-one knows when you've muted them, and you don't see their posts come up in your feed; you may, however, see that there have been posts from accounts you have muted, and the temptation is always to click that thing to see exactly what people have been saying. It's rarely anything worthwhile, and yet still we click. We always must click.

The trouble I find is that a lot of the absolute most insufferable people on social media are also people that I originally followed because I'm interested in the thing that their account suggested was their main interest! But at some point you have to ask the question: "am I still following this person out of a sense of obligation or the increasingly vain hope that they will post about the thing I followed them for, or because I want to see what they are actually posting on an hourly basis?" If the answer is the former, unfollowing or muting them is probably a good idea. Particularly if they aren't following you, in which case they probably won't even notice your absence.

But then that can, itself, be a bit disheartening. It can sometimes be frustrating to post something that I've worked hard on over on Bluesky and it seemingly pass by completely unnoticed, and then post some inane throwaway reply to someone about AI boosters being garbage people and get non-stop notifications of people liking and reposting that ultimately meaningless message for the next three days.

I think I'm just not built for social media. But, paradoxically, it's one of the only means I feel like I have of being able to connect with other people these days. And it sucks that it's that way. The alternative is just being alone, and I don't really want to do that — because I feel like I've proven beyond a doubt over the course of the last few years that if I just disappear quietly, absolutely no-one seems to notice or gives a shit.

And so, ever onward, until the end of time, I Post. Not because I want to, or because I enjoy it, but because I feel like I have to; like that is the only option to prove one's existence.

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The post #oneaday Day 799: The exhausting town square appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Much has been written by people much smarter than me about how the "cosy" and "wholesome" spaces are actually not all that wholesome at all — and in fact can harbour some of the truly most odious, harmful outlooks on life it's possible to have. Fairly high on this list is the complete unwillingness to be challenged by fiction in any way whatsoever — and I don't even mean "avoids material with complicated and difficult themes that even the most strong-stomached would find uncomfortable"; I mean absolutely completely and utterly unwilling to deal with something perfectly normal on the grounds that it isn't "wholesome" by the exceedingly narrow definition they have inscribed inside their own head.

Here's the post that kicked off the whole discussion today. It apparently hails from a mod for the recently full-released Fields of Mistria that makes a character "SFW" (safe for work).

To be clear: Fields of Mistria is not a porn game. It is not even an ecchi game — one with mild lewdity that stops short of full-on, explicit nudity or sexual content. These are some characters from Fields of Mistria:

And this is the specific character the commenter above is getting upset about:

Busty? Moderately, but not excessively so. Provocatively dressed? Mildly, but I think we can infer from her facial expression, pose and general demeanour that this is a character that is supposed to be sexy — and moreover, one who is very comfortable with that. This is emphatically not the same as her sprites being "sexual". I know nothing about Fields of Mistria but I can immediately infer the intent behind this character just from looking at these three sprites. And, indeed, her official description backs up pretty much everything I suspected about her — and none of it involves her sexual proclivities:

Juniper is a mysterious sorceress drawn to Mistria when she learns that magical mists and monsters of legend have begun appearing in the area after the recent earthquake. She then starts up a bath house. The bath house is largely a cover for testing her newly empowered potions and spells on the player and other unsuspecting townsfolk, usually resulting in buffs (and occasionally funny accidents)

The crucial thing though? This is not porn. This is not even ecchi levels of provocativeness. (Not that there is anything wrong with either of those things in an appropriate context, anyway!)

This is a character in a fantasy game, dressed in a style that fits with the personality and aesthetic the writers decided that she should have, in the context of the fantasy world. There is nothing offensive about this character unless you specifically choose to make it offensive.

And that is precisely what the commenter above has chosen to do. Not only that — and this really pisses me off — but they have chosen to weaponise autism as their justification for this.

No! You do not get to do that! I am autistic and fuckin' love titties! Your autism has nothing to do with you feeling "uncomfortable about her sprites". And, furthermore, it is the height of fucking disrespect to an artist (and the writers behind that character) to request that a third party deface their artwork so you don't have to confront your inability to process a non-sexual image of a female character that happens to dress in a way that shows a bit of skin.

Go outside! There are people who dress like this! (Maybe not the last one, unless it's a special occasion.) There are people whose bodies look like this! If you go to a swimming pool or beach — shock, horror! — you may even see someone dressed like the image in the middle! If your brain's first response to seeing someone dressed like any of the women above — but particularly the ones with visible cleavage, who may or may not have above-average sized breasts — is to immediately start shouting "I AM THINKING ABOUT SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH YOU" and emitting the "awooga" sound from old Tex Avery cartoons via some unknown part of your body, you have a problem!

And, I hate to break this to you, but it is not autism. It is, at its core, an unwillingness to see a woman as anything other than a sexual object for your own potential gratification. You can try and make yourself out to be "wholesome" by very publicly shouting and screaming about how you don't approve of this and how it makes you so uncomfortable and how this lascivious temptation must be removed from your sight, lest you know not what you might do… but in reality you simply have a problem with a woman dressing the way she wants to dress, expressing herself the way she wants to express herself, and, highly likely, not having sex with you.

I will close with a quote on the matter from the Japanese translator, Thomas James:

Shit like this is why I give wholesome games as a movement a constant stink-eye because what that audience often wants isn't relaxed, low stakes fare. They want content with zero intellectual calories that won't challenge them for being emotionally stunted. What a miserably boring way to consume art.

Quite.

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The post #oneaday Day 795: Titties - deal with them appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I mention this because I am seeing more and more reports of a "literacy crisis" that appears to be arising, primarily as a result of "BookTok" (i.e. people on the odious short-form video platform TikTok who supposedly talk about books) and "book influencers" (i.e. people on a broader range of primarily video-based social platforms who supposedly talk about books). Most recently, the thing that has come up is some of these people complaining to authors when they come across a word they do not understand — and rather than looking that word up for themselves, using it as an opportunity to learn, they instead throw their toys out of the pram and get very mardy, even going so far as to throw around terms like "ableist". (Fuck off. Your assumption that disabled people can't read is the ableist perspective here.)

This sort of behaviour is absolutely unthinkable and unfathomable to me. I have always loved it when I learn new words, concepts or ways to express myself from things that I've read. There are turns of phrase I picked up as a child that I still use to this day, and I relish the opportunity to make use of a word that I've recently learned.

I am also more than happy to look something up if I'm not sure of it. I actually tend to find this happens more often while I am writing than reading; I'll be tapping out a sentence, and for some reason a particular word that I'm not entirely certain of the definition of will pop into my head as maybe-possibly being appropriate for the situation. Rather than shying away from using that word for fear of appearing stupid by using it incorrectly, I will look it up, determine whether or not it is, in fact, appropriate for the situation in question, and then, if possible, make good use of it. It's not out of a desire to appear "clever" or to baffle the reader with my vast vocabulary; I just find it fun and satisfying to discover new ways in which one can play with language.

I've always been like this. I started reading books that were well ahead of where I was "supposed" to be as a kid, so by the time I got to primary school I was reading things several "Levels" ahead of my peers and taking on considerably more challenging reading comprehension exercises. By the top end of primary school, I was busting out words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" in the morning Daily Spellings session in Class Four, and being able to correctly use them in a sentence.

I apparently once also terrified my parents by, one day, aged maybe three or four, coming down the stairs and immediately quoting the beginning of Genesis to them. In this particular instance, it was not a "reading" thing — I hadn't been secretly ploughing through the Bible in between episodes of the Mr. Men — but rather a quotation from a cartoon I had recently watched on video. I guess it's connected, though; I had found the whole "In the beginning…" speech striking, so I wanted to deliver it in my own childish way. That's still a way of playing with language, just using the spoken word and listening instead of reading and writing.

The concept of "BookTok" makes me angry. It is completely beyond me exactly how anyone thought a community of people who make short-form attention-deficit videos online were ever going to come out with anything particularly worthwhile to say about a medium that rewards taking your time and drinking things in. And the very term "book influencer" makes me bristle. We never should have accepted the marketers' insistence than "influencer" is a valid job description. It's disgustingly dystopian, particularly since "influencer marketing" is now an established part of promoting any sort of product online.

I love language. I love reading, and I love writing. It makes me by turns sad and furious that, in the space of a generation or two, we appear to be losing all respect for the written word. Just the other day, I saw someone online earnestly recommending that anyone who wanted to spend their time talking about a favourite topic should "just become a TikToker" rather than starting a blog. I bit my tongue at the time because I couldn't be arsed to start a fight, but it just made me feel weary more than anything.

What are we doing? It almost feels like a deliberate attempt to siphon all the "culture" out of society, perhaps in an attempt to ensure that none of us step out of line or express any sorts of "dangerous" opinions.

Funny, I think there are a few books about that…

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The post #oneaday Day 751: Read/write access appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Both of them suffer from pretty much the same problems, and both are a result of the now well-documented phenomenon that is enshittification. In fact, it's almost uncanny how similar the two platforms' problems are — with the only real difference being that Nextdoor isn't trying to push AI-generated softcore porn "Reels" at me every five posts.

One of the main problems with both of these sites — and with a lot of other social media sites in general — is their insistence on providing a non-chronological feed of Stuff. Instead, they decide to surface relentless parades of absolute sewage that their mysterious "algorithms" believe are "Relevant" to you. In practice, what this means is that you get bombarded with a bunch of stuff that you don't give a shit about — often repeatedly. And the stuff in question is, more often than not, spam or outright scams.

On Nextdoor, for example, there's a post that is supposedly from an alcoholic person that keeps showing up in my feed despite my having shown no indication of any interest in it. I don't know what the point of the post is and I don't really want to know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's some form of advertising. Likewise, on Facebook, I'm continually confronted with "Suggested" posts that are very clearly adverts, but positioned in a way that is clearly designed to be incredibly deceptive towards those who aren't particularly Internet-savvy.

Then there's the notifications. Oh, God the notifications. Nextdoor is the worst for this by a significant margin. Given that the only thing I have posted on there is the request for people to look out for Oliver, one might naturally assume that the only notifications I might be interested in would be responses to that post. But no! Here's what my notifications look like as of this evening:

You will notice that none of these posts are anything to do with Oliver. You may also know that none of these posts are from people that I know. I'm not even convinced that they're all from people in the same area as me.

I get the intent behind this shit: the idea of Nextdoor is that it is supposed to build a community of neighbours, and one way of getting neighbours to recognise one another is to stuff them into each others' notifications, whether you want them or not. But this is not useful! The very point of notifications is so that you can get notified when something happens that you have been waiting to hear about! When you're dealing with a stressful situation like losing a pet, the last fucking thing you want is to see a notification pop up, think that someone might have a lead on your precious companion, only to find that it's someone who doesn't know which "there" to use whingeing about bin men or complaining about parking or some other such crap.

I don't have a great deal of faith that either of these sites are going to help us find Oliver. The one vaguely positive thing I can say in Facebook's favour specifically is that members of "lost pet" groups are proactive in resharing people's posts to other groups that you might not have joined yourself. That increases the visibility of your original post and, in theory, makes it more likely that it might cross the path of someone who might be able to help — although that, unfortunately, has not happened as yet.

Still, it's something, at least, and posting on these places is something that I can at least monitor while we're away from the house. It hasn't come to anything as yet, but it only has to come to something once for it to have been worthwhile. So I guess we'll have to wait and see — but I suspect once we get home, it will be back to searching for him ourselves and hoping, wishing, praying for his eventual safe return.

It's our last full day away tomorrow, and that will also mark two weeks since Oliver went missing. I still don't know how to feel, other than sad, upset and frustrated. But in a couple of days' time, we're going to have to at least attempt to move on with our lives as best we can in the meantime, and whatever happens from thereon, happens.

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The post #oneaday Day 736: The sewage of social media appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I talked a bit about social media with my therapist yesterday. I discussed how conflicted I feel about existing online right now, what with the emphasis on short-form video and vapid content rather than longer-form, more meaningful material. I'm not saying that the stuff I post here isn't vapid nonsense, of course, but I have always said that I would far rather read someone's vapid nonsense than be delivered it as shouty-face-at-camera content, so this blog continues with that in mind. And if no-one is interested in my vapid nonsense, then at least I still have somewhere to bang out some words and express myself, which is what this has always been about.

Anyway, the kind-of-sort-of conclusion I came to was that at least a minimal presence on social media is somewhat desirable for me, because otherwise I just end up feeling completely isolated. While I enjoyed the total break from all social media, including Bluesky, that I took last year while I was on holiday, I found that I didn't want to maintain it afterwards, as it just left me feeling even more lonely than I already was. And I'm already feeling pretty damn lonely.

Still, the other thing that came to light in yesterday's session is that although I have always kind of feared social interactions and find myself overthinking conversations before I have them — sometimes to the extent that I never actually start the conversation in reality for the fear of coming across as boring or annoying — I am, in many respects, feeling kind of ready to challenge myself in at least attempting to make some new friends, to have some people that I can connect with and, basically, to stop feeling so danged lonely.

The challenge that I have found along the way is not so much initiating those interactions when the opportunity arises — although that is still a somewhat scary prospect for me — but rather finding those opportunities in the first place. I cited an example of when I first went to university and attended a pre-term music course, and I took the uncharacteristically bold step (for me) of introducing myself to someone I was in a lift with while we were transporting ourselves to our respective floors in the tower block where we were staying. That resulted in a longstanding friendship (albeit one that I will hold my hands up and say that I have been very poor at maintaining) and was proof that, as little as I think of myself at times, I can come across as someone that people actually do want to know and are not, in fact, actively repulsed by.

Those opportunities of being "trapped" in a lift with a stranger and the choice being either awkward silence or attempting to clunkily start a conversation just don't really seem to arise these days, though, because I'm never in that sort of situation. I work from home, I don't go out a great deal, I'm not a member of any "groups" or anything (and don't really know how one would go about finding a "group") and I do not have a publicly accessible elevator in my house.

What I am going to at least attempt to do a bit more, though, is to attend some in-person events where I know some people with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance will be attending. My trip to The Cave a few weeks back was a good example, and last year I went to the RetroFest show in Swindon — that is actually happening again this year, but I left it a bit late to organise a trip there. I mean, I could probably snag a ticket and go along tomorrow (today's tickets are sold out), but can I be bothered to do that?

Hmm, can I be bothered to do that…? I might have a think about that throughout the course of today. Swindon is a fairly long way to go, but it might actually be nice to go along and see some interesting things and clever people.

Hmmmmm.

Anyway, today we are going food shopping, so that's fun. Thank you for participating in this experiment of whether or not this thing actually posts correctly to Bluesky via the ATmosphere plugin. If it does, I'll likely hook up MoeGamer proper in the same way. Tatty-bye for now then.

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The post #oneaday Day 722: Entering the ATmosphere appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've already written at length about how the modern concept of "streaks" is inherently unhealthy and encourages people to just game the system rather than actually properly developing good habits, but this is a whole new level of stupid. I was curious as to exactly what a "streak freeze" entailed, so I clicked through on the notification and found the following explanation:

So let me get this straight: WordPress (or Jetpack, I think, specifically) has a "streak" mechanic built in to encourage you to engage with… something every day. (Note that the explanation above counts "liking, commenting or following" as "activity", not just "posting something on your site".) But after 7 days, you can just go "ah, fuck this" for a day and still keep your "streak" intact?

Now, I've hopefully already made my feelings on "streaks" clear (and yes, I know it might seem a tad hypocritical given that I'm posting daily, counting how many days I have done that for and have even done extra posts some days to "catch up" on days I missed but… shut up) but to me the concept of a "streak freeze" just feels like… cheating? And, more to the point, it's a completely pointless form of cheating in which the only person you are actually cheating is yourself. (Yes, I am familiar with the copypasta.)

It's not just me seeing this, right? Given that your "streak" in WordPress or Jetpack or whatever is visible to no-one but you — there are no "Share" buttons on these stupid "achievements" it has apparently started giving you — there is absolutely no point whatsoever in cheating the system for any reason other than to deny to yourself, and no-one else, that you failed to do something as simple as click "Like" on a thing every day for [x] days.

As I say, I acknowledge completely that all of the above might be a bit rich coming from someone who has occasionally missed a day on his "daily" blog and then "caught up" the following day, but I do always acknowledge when I've done that, and I'm not giving myself any "awards" or anything besides counting how many days have elapsed between June 8, 2024 and today. (And yes, I did just use the opportunity to check that my post numbering is correct. It is.)

The way this is implemented as platform "achievements" just feels like they wanted to completely gamify the posting experience, then got cold feet partway through and thought but what about all the people who care about their streak and just don't have time to click Like on something every day?! — as if they were afraid that they would get complaints from people who thought it was "unfair" that they broke their streak just for not… maintaining that streak.

I dunno. I am very aware that this is all a completely pointless thing to get riled up about, but it is very hot, I am very tired and stressed, and just wanted something easy to write about today. So that's what you're getting. Now I'm off to go and swallow an entire iceberg or something. And not the kind that freezes streaks.

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The post #oneaday Day 719: Get out of here with your "streak freeze" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is, obviously, garbage news, and anyone with any sense will already be looking for a new search engine to set as default on every device they own — even though I don't think there's a single one of them that has no AI whatsoever at this point — but there are interesting possibilities that present themselves as a result of this stupidity.

Firstly, if there's no Google search, that might finally mean we'll be free of search engine optimisation, which by extension means we might also end up free of clickbait and ragebait. Of course, the latter two options are driven as much by social media than search results — probably more so, if we're honest — but honestly, I can't say I'd be sorry to see the back of SEO. Ten Blue Links are no fun if all of them are jostling for position with articles titled "what time is Eurovision on?" or whatever.

Of course, another ugly possibility then presents itself: search engine optimisation will become chatbot optimisation, and I suspect that will be even worse. SEO can already be manipulated by bad actors to present confidently incorrect information as gospel — sometimes with nefarious intent — and chatbots are already renowned for picking up people saying obvious falsehoods as a throwaway comment in a Reddit thread, and then reporting those things as the truth. Remember glue on pizza? Yeah. Incidents like that are chatbot optimisation in its earliest incarnation.

So that brings us to the second point: what if this is what gets us to admit that the "World Wide" part of the "Web" has, in fact, been something of a failure. I think we can probably all agree that the US has dominated the Web for a significant portion of its lifespan, and it's US-based companies that are trying to reshape it in a fashion that will, they reckon, make billions for US-based billionaires who already have too many billions.

Of course, all of the businesses attempting to do this are failing miserably at that. Despite billions of imaginary dollars being thrown around on a seemingly daily basis, profitability appears to be something that continues to elude the generative AI space, and it only appears to be getting worse, with many providers switching to considerably more expensive token-based billing options for users who have, up until now, been costing these companies astronomical amounts of money.

But even if the entire generative AI space were to go tits-up tomorrow — and oh, gosh, I would love it if it did — I think a lot of damage has already been done to the original plan of the World Wide Web. The Internet is no longer a cool and exciting place to hang out and explore. It's become a sleazy, shitty inner city area where you shouldn't walk around after dark, and where you certainly shouldn't get your phone out on the street. So much of it is just there to if not outright scam you, then at least extract money from you in increasingly ridiculous ways.

I see it a lot, running a blog. I'll install a plugin that sounds like it performs a function that I would find helpful, only to find that the exact function I want to use is "only available in Premium", and of course you can't just buy Premium because it's 2026, you have to sign up for a subscription. And you can't pay monthly for that subscription because it's 2026, you can only pay for a year at a time, despite them quoting a "monthly" price on their order page. The Web in general is full of shitty, dark patterns like this designed to trick people into spending money they didn't need to spend. I have no objection to paying people for good, useful pieces of software, but not when the process of doing so is a minefield of potentially getting locked into having to shell out several hundred quid a year because you didn't see the tiny "*billed annually" at the bottom of the "BEST OFFER!" thrust in your face.

Anyway, I got a bit off the point. The main point was: the current implementation of "the World Wide Web" is shit, so what if this meant that we go back to the concept of "portals"? Portals, if you're unfamiliar, are how sites like Yahoo got started: they were designed to act as the first page you saw when you logged on to the Internet, and thus provided quick, categorised, curated sets of links that helped you to 1) find stuff that you were looking for and 2) discover interesting new stuff. Search engines developed out of portals; indeed, many former portal sites became search engines; Google itself was a bit of an outlier in this regard in that it launched as nothing more than a search engine; its intention to do one thing, really well.

I often think back to our early days of "going online" back home. After the BBS days, which we occasionally indulged in on both the Atari 8-bit and ST, we had a CompuServe subscription. And CompuServe was a ton of fun! It was a complete walled garden to begin with, and took a while to catch on to this whole "broader Internet" thing, but in many ways, retrospectively, I think that its curated way of doing things was very good. People rag on AOL for the bajillion free trial coaste… sorry, CDs that made their way around the world in the late '90s and early '00s, but they had a similar idea: present information in an interesting, clear, curated way for people to enjoy and engage with as they see fit.

Of course, this approach brings with it its own considerations: who is responsible for the curation? How does one get "noticed" with a personal project like a blog? Are these portal providers obliged to be "neutral" in terms of things like politics and suchlike? If not, how does one distinguish between a portal provider that places an emphasis on curating information that is actively harmful, and one that aligns with your own values? Probably the same way you pick a news source today, I guess.

Anyway, I don't really have an answer, but if Google is insistent on going the way of the chatbot, this is probably something we're going to have to grapple with in the next few years. The way the Internet is today just… isn't really working, at least not with the original intent of the technology in mind, so we should probably start thinking about how we can do something a bit different… a bit better.

Or we could just continue to moan on social media and never actually get anything done, I guess.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 713: Portal charm appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Sometimes I don't know how to feel about something because my moral superiors have not yet made a super long video. They don't always make a video about the thing I need, though. Like, I don't know if someone is still bad or if they've been exonerated. Since we don't trust any structure that would provide exoneration, and objectivity is illusory, since the law is merely another arena to sift power dynamics anyway, my guess is that their good opinion, once lost, is lost forever. Speaking of power dynamics, It must be neat to have the reins of a parallel legal system whose norms kaleidoscopically shift at a rate of one million shibboleths per second. The main issue is that it's not clear which games I'm allowed to buy. All I can do – all anyone can do – is spin very quickly in place while refreshing YouTube for the next sermon. I'm currently ablur.

Tycho is specifically referring to the hoohah over Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, the recent new game from ZA/UM, the company behind the exceedingly brilliant Disco Elysium, and a company mired in controversy for the way it subsequently treated the actual people who made Disco Elysium. I don't really know much more about it than that, and to be perfectly honest, I don't really give enough of a shit to look into it further. I'm sorry, I just don't.

You see, as you might expect in such a situation, moral grandstanding over the way ZA/UM has behaved in the past has been overshadowing any meaningful discussion of Zero Parades itself, with the reviewers who took it on its own terms and gave it a positive assessment — apparently it's very good! — getting lambasted by people who think they are The Most Correct Person in the Room.

The phenomenon Tycho is talking about is the disconnect one eventually starts to feel when constantly confronted by this: the situation where you want to talk about how much you like something that you have taken on its own terms, divorced from "context" — regardless of whether this was a deliberate move, or just because your particular life and social circumstances meant you had never come into contact with any "controversy" — but find yourself having to bite your tongue, because you know it's not "acceptable" to like the thing for one reason or another.

I'm not even talking about particularly controversial material here — like, even the most perverted hentai connoisseur knows when not to bring up his collection of Rias Gremory boob bouncing gifs — but rather, situations like we have here, where an entity that is tangentially connected to the thing in question is deemed to have done something so unconscionably unacceptable that it taints anything and everything associated with itself, regardless of whether the thing itself is any good or not, and regardless of whether the people who actually made the thing had anything to do with the controversy.

A lot of this stuff spreads via social media and, as Tycho says, via video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. A lot of people look to "influencers" (ugh) as opinion leaders, and wait to learn whether it's "acceptable" in the eyes of someone they believe in before even considering engaging with it. Essentially it's a form of cognitive surrender; they willingly give up their own ability to make their mind up about something in favour of blindly following everything their opinion leader of choice says and does. And this sort of person tends to hold a grudge for a very long time indeed; as Tycho says, it's exceedingly rare for anyone branded with a scarlet letter to be exonerated, while the reverse is also true: someone who has been a beloved figure for years can be quickly turned on, torn to shreds and then left to rot, never to be forgiven and never to regain their former regard, regardless of whether or not they clearly make an effort to make amends for past wrongs.

Honestly, at this point it's exceedingly tiresome. There are certain people on Bluesky I've had to mute just because their constant response to people Just Enjoying The Thing is to bring up the controversy du jour and, in many cases, cast exceedingly unflattering and negative aspersions on the people who continue to Just Enjoy The Thing. In just the last week it's happened not only with Zero Parades, but also with Forza Horizon 6, and I'm sure there will be plenty more. There have certainly been plenty of prior examples, including numerous instances of the "we will never forgive them" situation.

Look, I get it. In this revolting, shitty world we live in, it's nice to think that you have some principles and that you're willing to stand up for them. Everyone should have at least a few issues that they're willing to stand up and be counted on. But there comes a point where you're just being a tedious scold at people who are simply trying to derive some joy out of existence, and who really do not have the time or energy to give a shit about every single little issue in the world, particularly when the issues that you supposedly care about are in the extreme periphery of the thing they are trying to enjoy — and seemingly not even directly connected at all, to the average person who is not huffing Internet fumes 25 hours a day.

I'm sorry, but it is just like that. If you do try and give a shit about every single little issue in the world, you will quickly end up driving yourself insane, driving everyone who might have once been your friend away, and never, ever experiencing a day of happiness in your life ever again.

On top of that, if your idea of Being A Good Person is scolding random strangers on Bluesky rather than actually getting out into the world and making some sort of meaningful difference to the lives of people who need it, then you might not actually be A Good Person. You just want people to believe that you are.

Life is too short for that. So if you want to play Zero Parades, I don't care. If you want to play Forza Horizon 6, I don't care. If you want to boycott everything ZA/UM and Microsoft ever put out, I don't really care, either. But if you start actively getting in the way of people who simply want an escape from the shittiness of life in 2026 — or to build a warm, kind community of people who want a collective escape from the shittiness of life in 2026 — then I'm sorry, but I don't really want to know you.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 712: Cognitive surrender appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The most recent case comes in the form of someone who posits that Bluesky, as a whole, has been bad for American political discourse, because it has effectively siloed off pretty much the entire "Left" into their own little bubble. This isn't an entirely inaccurate view of the situation, but you also have to bear in mind that this largely occurred because Twitter, under Elon Musk, made a specific effort to silo off pretty much the entire "Right" into their own little bubble. Consequently, Twitter is more of a shithole than it's ever been in the past, and Bluesky… well, it's occasionally all right, occasionally prone to the sorts of behaviour that made me sour on Twitter in the first place. At least for the most part you don't have to put up with Nazis and "grok what is this" underneath every post.

I'm not here to talk about the relative merits of Bluesky itself though; rather, I want to focus on a post from Ars Technica's Kyle Orland, itself a response to a post from journalist Faine Greenwood, semi-seriously commenting on what people really need to do if they want to use social media to get a political message out:

I see this viewpoint expressed a lot these days, and while it is disappointingly not entirely wrong about the situation, it does, to me, reflect a defeatist attitude to culture: the assumption that there can be only one dominant form of media, and that in this case, it is lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time.

I, as I have made pretty clear on numerous occasions in the past, fucking hate lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time. I find it actively insulting to my intelligence, and incredibly offputting when someone posts, like, say, "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:" followed by a video of their face pressed up against the camera yelling whatever their important announcement is. I never find out, because I am actively repulsed by that kind of video.

Aside: in a Discord I frequent, one poster continually reposts this guy's stuff, and dear Lord I find it the most offputting thing imaginable. Nothing to do with the guy's appearance; I just don't want that many faces yelling at me.

Anyway, the thing I find frustrating about all this is: who the fuck decided that the only thing we're allowed to do now is lowest-common-denominator, vapid, attention-deficit short-form video with karaoke-style captions updating one word at a time? Who the fuck decided that writing is out, particularly long-form writing? Because I certainly fucking didn't.

I like reading! I like reading long things! I like writing! I like writing long things! As far as I'm concerned, a good piece of writing is much more likely to stand the test of time than vertical video of someone's grandpa wittering on about The Super Mario Galaxy Movie! And I find it near-impossible to believe that I am alone in this!

I am part of a generation who grew up with books, magazines, and websites that posted long-form writing. As far as I am aware, my entire generation hasn't suddenly dropped dead overnight, so why the fuck can't we have at least a basic bit of respect for our tastes rather than this content slurry that is shat out at great force and speed every day?

"Oh, but Pete, people are still serving your niche," you might say. Are they? Are they actually though? Because last time I checked, games media sites were being shut down or turned into thinly-veiled gambling advertisements at a frightening rate. I used to have magazines and websites that I read on a regular basis; today, even people who I used to respect as people who always seemed that they'd keep blogging, come rain or shine, have all but vanished from the Internet, leaving us with little more than the garbage left behind.

Perhaps those are the people who have the right idea. Give up on trying to "find an audience" on the Internet, and just retreat into a world where these issues don't exist. There are still a few magazines out there — although gaming-specific ones are thin on the ground. There are folks making fanzines and suchlike. New books continue to be written — some of them even without being AI-generated! So perhaps the answer is just to retreat, quietly, and continue to enjoy the few good things that do, apparently against all odds, still exist.

It just feels like giving up a space where I always felt like I could "be myself" and express myself freely has been taken over, completely, by the supposedly "cool kids" who are actually vapid fuckheads with nothing of any real substance to contribute to culture. And that really sucks. "The Internet" used to be somewhere that felt like I was home, where I was among my people. I haven't felt that for a long time now.

I don't feel like we should have just rolled over and let this happen — but that is what happened, and there doesn't appear to be any way to turn back from it now. And no-one appears to be in any great hurry to correct this situation.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 705: Resist mediocre anti-intellectualism appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is such a valuable thing to have, whatever form it takes. And I know I say a lot of things on this blog, but there are certain things I have second thoughts before posting about. Just this evening, I deleted the start of a post where I was going to have a go about something, then decided that the potential arguments it might start (it's not anything racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or anything like that, don't worry) just simply would not be worth the stress it would cause.

To put it another way, the benefits I would gain from getting those thoughts out of my head and onto paper would be far outweighed by the stress any subsequent "discourse" might cause. (Or it might not. But in this instance I think it's best to just not take the risk at all.)

Modern life is exhausting, and talking to the people who are closest to you can sometimes be difficult for all manner of different reasons. When that's the case, you can find yourself bottling up emotions, particularly frustrations and anger, and not really having any way to release them. And that's why having a space to say things is important.

Your space to say things doesn't have to be Going to Therapy. It could be a journal that you keep for yourself, written by hand and locked in a drawer, for your eyes only. It could be a password-protected note in your note-taking app of choice. It could be a voice memo you leave for yourself. It could be abstractly represented through a piece of art, music or writing you choose to create. It could be something you tell your cat when no-one else is around.

It can take many forms. What's important is that you feel like you have it. Ideally it provides you with a feeling of "release", that you've let those emotions out of your brain, acknowledging their existence and how they are making you feel, and perhaps contemplating why you are having them in the first place.

Is the thing you think you are mad about really the thing you are actually mad about, or is it a symptom of something more broad that you need to deal with? Is the whole thing a situation you have put yourself in that you can just as easily extract yourself from? Take a step back from the part of you that is angry and frustrated, and talk to them. What, exactly, is upsetting them? Why are they feeling that way? What do they think they should do about it? What do they think they can do about it? What do they think the consequences for doing something about it might be, and do they think those consequences are worth the temporary catharsis of doing the thing?

There are no easy answers about this sort of thing, but it always pays to be reflective and contemplative. The modern world — and particularly the Internet — is set up in such a way to deliberately make us nearly constantly mad and frustrated, and it's easy to forget that when the red mist starts to descend and all you want to do is yell at someone. That's what a significant amount of the Internet wants, and I'm not just talking about trolls. It's in corporations' interests to keep you mad, because being mad means you're engaged. And engagement, after all, is the be-all and end-all of modern-day "KPIs".

I've taken a step back from the thing I was mad about. I'm still a bit mad about it, but on reflection, it's really not something that is all that worth getting mad about. It is something I can, relatively easily, put to one side and never think about ever again.

So I think I'm going to do that. Or at least try to, anyway.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 686: A space to say things appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

You see, being The Social Media Guy for a brand means that you have to face down the absolute worst end of humanity online day after day. You have to just sit back and take abuse from random strangers. You have to listen to fuckheads taking the piss out of things that you've worked hard on. You have to watch people spread lies. And in pretty much all of these cases, you have very little power to actually do anything about them. In the meantime, you're expected to put across the image of being relentlessly chipper, positive and call-to-action-y in an attempt to get a society full of people with an attention span of less than three seconds to give a shit about the thing you've worked hard on.

Honestly, it's a complete and total drag. When you're working at a job you actually like, on a product that you actually believe in and are proud to be associated with, the absolute last thing you want to see is a bunch of Facebook randos wilfully misunderstanding what it is you're doing, and being incredibly rude about it. I know that most of these people aren't posting the things they post out of an intention to make someone feel bad — most people see a brand account and think it's a "faceless" thing — but, as someone who has spent some time being the face behind that brand account, let me tell you: when you act like a cunt to the brand, someone has to read your bullshit just in case you might actually have a valid issue, and if you're being a cunt, you're probably making someone feel bad.

It's one of those things that you don't really notice at first. You can laugh it off as "oh, look at these silly Internet people". Over time, though, it really starts to get to you. The fact that you can't just respond to one of these people, go "look, shut the fuck up, no-one gives a shit about what you think, and there is an entire team of people behind me who have worked their arses off on this thing you're being dismissive about" is frustrating. Honestly, I would respect any brand account that fully took the gloves off and took an abusive commenter down a peg or two, but it's Not The Done Thing.

I'm glad to be out of it. It's not my problem any more. There are people who can do a much better job at it than me, and I am more than happy to let them take care of it while I get on with some of the things where my actual strengths lie. For now, that means continuing to write blog posts, videos and documentation, and stepping up the amount of playtesting and "tech" work that I get to do. I'm hoping I will learn something over the long term — and in the short term, it feels like I have even greater involvement in working on things that actually mean something to me, and that I feel have value.

I hope I never have to look back. I have been looking forward to the day I never have to look at Twitter and Facebook ever again for a long time, and now it's pretty much here — barring any occasions when I need to cover someone who's off, because unfortunately I'm the one who is most qualified (or I should perhaps say experienced) for that cover. But I'll take it for now. This is a positive step, and one that I'm happy about.

Just remember to be kind to the people posting stuff from a brand that you have an interest in. Someone has to read that vitriol you post, and I can guarantee they have a million and one ways they'd rather spend their day.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 682: Freedom! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

If you've ever watched any of Rosie's videos, you will know that he absolutely adds "significant original commentary, substantive modifications" and "educational or entertainment value" to every one of his videos. If you're unfamiliar, Rosie's shtick these days is to go through an old TV show and provide acerbic, sarcastic but thoughtful commentary that is frequently hilarious. This commentary is often punctuated with original creative work that Rosie has produced, including remixes of songs in the show, all-original songs that he has created, and sometimes some absolutely brilliant overdubbing and re-editing.

His difficulties largely seem to stem from the fact that he primarily covers old TV shows now, and, as you might expect, making use of clips of these is rife with potential copyright issues. However, YouTube's provisions — and indeed the legal definitions of "fair use" and "fair dealings" — allow the use of copyrighted material, so long as the creator using that work is making substantive changes to them, making it clear that they cannot in any way be confused for the original material.

No-one is going to watch a video on Rosie's channel and say that he is making anything that could be confused for the original. No-one can possibly watch his channel and say that he has not made substantive, creative changes to the stuff he is providing commentary on. He puts in a whole lot more effort than a lot of "reaction" YouTubers — and at the very least, his work could be described as "reaction content". In reality it's much more than that, but since "reaction content" is one of the specific examples YouTube provides of material that can safely be monetised, it's a relevant, absolute bare minimum definition.

The infuriating thing about whenever something like this happens is the completely opaque way in which YouTube communicates these things. There's a problem with "reused content" — sure. Where? When? What video? Why, exactly, is this being picked up on now when it's been fine for several years? None of those questions are answered by YouTube, and you can bet your sweet bippy that they will make it as hard as humanly possible to speak to a living, breathing person who should be able to get this resolved in a matter of minutes.

It's bad enough when something like this happens to small creators who are making little to no money off YouTube. But Rosie, who has found some decent success on the platform over the last few years — and deservedly so — is using YouTube as an important income stream to support himself and his family. For that to be suddenly taken away without warning last thing on a Sunday night, of all times, is completely unacceptable.

At the very minimum, platforms like YouTube should be legally obligated to say exactly what the problem is when inflicting as harsh a punishment as "you now can't make any money from your videos". I suspect the reason they don't is because the majority of this shit is the fault of their "automated systems", and they don't want to admit that sometimes (quite often) they get things very, very wrong.

This is, after all, the second time this has happened to Rosie after a similar incident in November of 2024. Thankfully, that was eventually resolved after a concerted effort by Rosie and people who cared about him — here's hoping that this time is similarly fixed, and our friend can get back to doing what he does best, and what he loves doing.

In the meantime, if you're not subscribed to Rosie, drop by his channel. He's got a lot of great videos there, and deserves your support.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 646: #justice4rts... again appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The website "Android Police" posted an incredibly stupid article today, headlined "I use Gemini when I'm bored — and it's better than doomscrolling". I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the premise of this article is spectacularly dumb and the author, Anu Joy, should feel bad for having written it… if indeed they are actually a real person. You never can be sure of that with engagement-bait articles these days, and the author's complete lack of online presence beyond LinkedIn doesn't fill me with confidence that they actually exist. But never mind.

I'm not going to link to the article because it doesn't deserve it, but I am going to systematically destroy it for today's post, which features a lot of swearing. Hope you don't mind, about either part of that statement. If you do, well, tough titties.

Cock!

Turning boredom into a 5-minute adventure

The first lake-boiling, environmentally ruinous use of the lying plagiarism machine that Anu Joy cites as an antidote to boredom is "turning it into a mini choose-your-own-adventure generator", with her argument being that "rather than passively consuming content, I now engage with short, interactive stories that unfold in real time, making them ideal for five-minute boredom gaps."

In response to this, I would like to introduce any Gemini-brained fuckwits to the long, rich and deep history of the interactive fiction genre, all of which has been written by actual humans, and designed to occupy you for anything between a few minutes and multiple hours — possibly even days or weeks if you get stuck and have the willpower to not look at a walkthrough.

It's easy to get involved with interactive fiction, too! There are plenty of great standalone games that fall into this category, such as Inkle's excellent titles 80 Days, Overboard!, Expelled! and more, plus their adaptations of actual choose-your-own-adventure-style gamebooks such as Sorcery! The indie marketplace itch.io has a whole tag for titles developed in Twine, which are essentially hypertext-based choose-your-own-adventure games. And if you want to get into the history of the medium and its rich diversity developed over the course of the last 40+ years, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) has more interactive fiction than you can probably get through in a lifetime, much of which can be played online right there in your web browser.

Or you could, I don't know, actually read a Choose Your Own Adventure book. They still exist, you know! And, as an adult, a single "run" through one will probably only take you about five minutes!

"Oh, but Gemini can make me something that's never been done before!" No it fucking can't! That's sort of the problem with LLMs! They will never, ever have an original thought because their entire fucking functionality is built on plagiarising other people's work. So why not actually go and enjoy a human being's work rather than burning down a forest to get the obsequious chatbot to "tell you a story?"

FUCK.

Quizzes, riddles and brain-teasers on demand

Do I really have to dignify this with a response? Okay, here are some places you can take quizzes online that don't involve getting a lying robot to make shit up:

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the place where we used to go to look things up before the Internet, has a whole page full of quizzes.

Puzzle publishing company Lovatts has a straightforward and flexible quiz you can challenge any time.

Fucking Buzzfeed, the website where clickbait goes to die, has tons of quizzes. They're sort of famous for them! (EDIT: I had forgotten that Buzzfeed "pivoted to AI" a couple of years back. Maybe forget about this one.)

The best news of all is that these quizzes are put together by actual humans, so the answers should be right, which is not something you can guarantee with the garbage LLMs like Gemini spew out!

FUUUUUCK.

Curiosity on demand, without the time sink

"Oooh, but Gemini is so good at research and telling me fun little facts!"

Heard of Wikipedia? They feature a different article on their front page every day. And those articles are written by humans. (They're specifically trying to fend off the lying chatbots right now.) Not only that, if you want to dive deeper, they are sourced, so you can actually follow up on the things they say.

If you really want to surprise yourself, bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random — that will take you to a completely random page, where you can start a whole new knowledge journey that doesn't involve polluting the drinking water of any communities. (Fun fact: you can use /wiki/Special:Random on any sites that run on the MediaWiki software, not just Wikipedia!)

FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

Gemini as a creative partner

"Some days, I'll argue whether pineapple on pizza is a culinary crime or a stroke of genius," Joy writes. If that's the level of your creativity, I suggest throwing a dart at Reddit and posting about how cool and random?! you think bacon is, you t3hPeNgU1NoFd00m, you.

If you just want someone to talk to, that is literally what social media is for. I know there are lots of things one can criticise about social media (particularly the Nazi bar that is Twitter in 2026), but if you just want to start a conversation with someone, there are few things easier than typing "@random hello, I disagree with your opinion on the Star Wars prequels, let's have a fight" or some other such bollocks.

If you want to talk to someone you don't know, there are services for that, too! Join a random Discord — or even better, one for something you're interested in! Play an MMO! Go on IRC! Brave Chatroulette! (Omegle apparently doesn't exist any more after some nasty shit went down there, so maybe don't go there.)

Just don't waste your fucking life talking to the cunting chatbot. It doesn't love you. It never will. And you're making the worst people in the world richer just by looking at it.

FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!

Boredom doesn't stand a chance

If you are bored in the world as it exists today and can't think of anything better to do than open up Google fucking Gemini, you are a lost fucking cause. There is more entertainment, more media, more games, more reading material, more opportunities for socialising online than there have ever been. Not only that, there are unprecedented opportunities for you to get creative and express yourself in all manner of different ways, regardless of your past experience. You could even start your very own blog where you yell at people who might not exist!

There is no fucking excuse for turning to the chatbot "because you're bored". Even if the absolute limit of your creativity is "debating the merits of pineapple pizza", which Joy mentions twice in that dogshit article.

I realise that I have given the article in question far more attention than it ever deserved. But hey! It was the inspiration for something actually creative. And who knows? Someone might actually find some of the links I've provided useful.

Friends don't let friends use chatbots. So if I ever hear that you, dear reader, have turned to Google Gemini "because you're bored", I will hunt you down, wherever you are, and I will slap you repeatedly about the face with a wet trout.

Here endeth the lesson.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 642: I will never use Gemini when I'm bored appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

What I mean by this is that point in an online argument where people start going on about "ad hominem", "strawmen", "motte and bailey" and "No True Scotsman". And probably some others.

These are all valid logical fallacies, of course, but the sheer frequency with which they are trotted out by people absolutely desperate to win an online argument makes it absolutely exhausting to even attempt having a discussion about some things. Because more often than not, the person busting out The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies isn't actually interested in getting their point across or changing anyone's mind; they just want to feel like they "won" the argument. And, at the point The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies enters the picture, this is usually part of an attempt to paint themselves as the victim.

Other telltale signs include attempting to argue that positive representation of marginalised groups is actually a form of racism and/or sexism (against straight white men, obviously), taking great offence at the concept of fascism even being mentioned (and often expressing a desire that it be "discussed" or "debated"), using the term "diversity of opinion", claiming that women, non-white ethnic minorities and/or transgender people in leading roles are somehow "unrealistic" and, of course, turning to that old favourite term: woke.

Now, I won't lie. There were a few years where I found myself skating around this territory. I've talked more about that in this post, so I won't repeat the soul-searching and heart-opening from that post (though I encourage you to read it if you would like to know more). However, people can learn, grow and change, and that is exactly what I have done over the years. Across the COVID years and into Trump's second presidency, I have come to see that a lot of the things the people I once dismissed as online firebrands were attempting to warn us all about have actually come true.

And, as an extension of that, I came to see that some of the times I was needlessly defensive and insular, I should have been standing alongside people. After all, my beliefs have always erred on the left-leaning side of things; my frustration from those dark years was, as much as anything, frustration at being lumped in with right-wing-to-far-right-outright-Nazis based on nothing more than the media I enjoyed — particularly anime-adjacent stuff that often took a walk on the lewd side of life.

I knew that I wasn't a bad person, and I knew that enjoying the things I enjoyed didn't make me a bad person; frustration at being assumed to be a bad person based on those tastes was what caused me to lash out and, at times, do and say things that I regret. And yet even back then, I could see those deploying The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies as what they were: people who didn't really care about anything other than scoring imaginary Internet Points. They were not my allies. They were not my friends. They were insufferable dickheads.

Today, I recognise that it is, in fact, possible to have the interests and tastes I do and not find yourself drifting towards the shit-encrusted mouth of what is typically referred to today as "the alt-right pipeline". There are lots of left-leaning folks who do love sexy stuff, and one thing I will say for online discourse is that discussion over such things has improved over the course of the last ten years or so. There's still a way to go, but it's better.

As part of that, it's important to recognise that certain parts of popular media do have a far-right problem. And as part of that recognition, it's important to stand up and say that you will not stand for tossers ruining the thing that you love, rather than being frustrated at feeling like you're getting lumped in with said tossers. You probably aren't, so long as you're not using their talking points.

Such as, you know, The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies. There really is only one type of person who busts out The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies during an online discussion. And believe me, you don't want to be that person.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 639: The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Cellophane, Mister Cellophane
Shoulda been my name, Mister Cellophane
'Cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me
And never know I'm there

(Mister Cellophane by John C. Reilly, from the musical "Chicago")

I don't wish the following to sound like self-pitying or a cry for attention, but it will almost certainly come out that way, and for this I apologise in advance.

Do you ever have days where you feel like you're "invisible"? Like, if you just weren't there, no-one would notice? I seem to be feeling this a lot more as I get older, but it's something that has always followed along with me to one degree or another.

As young as my teenage years, I remember, on several occasions, feeling like I wasn't sure if my friends really liked me, or if they were just putting up with me as a sort of "attachment" to one of their other friends. Given the oddly volatile nature of hormonal adolescent friendships, this is perhaps not a surprising way for someone to feel — I recall multiple other occasions where, for one reason or another, several of us who were, under normal circumstances, best friends, suddenly just… weren't any more for a little while. This normally only lasted a day or two, and it usually involved the one who instigated the temporary "split" trying to get "in" with some of the cooler kids. I don't recall any occasions where something like this resulted in a member of our mutual circle of friends completely abandoning us, but it is this sort of thing that made me uneasy and anxious at times.

At university, I had friends and acquaintances I attended my course with, but again, there were times where I felt like if I just wasn't there, nobody would really give a shit.

A lot of this stems from what I now know to be social anxiety caused by autism, but that unfortunately doesn't make it much easier to deal with — because I still feel this sort of thing to this day. I find it difficult to "maintain" relationships because I get overly worried about being a bother to someone who, in my mind, I have built up to be someone who resents my presence. And, on occasions where I feel like I have been someone who has been making that effort, it's hard not to feel rejected when the other parties involved aren't as interested in maintaining the relationships as you are.

The reason I'm talking about this today is because, once again, a video game site has been suffering layoffs — this time the long-established Eurogamer. And as the various people announced that they were no longer working there, and that they were looking for employment, lots of other people piped up and said how important their time together had been, how much they enjoyed working together, what fond memories they had of various projects they collaborated on.

I saw that and I felt painfully conscious that, when my career in the games press came to an unceremonious end, I didn't really feel like any of that happened for me. I feel like very few people really noticed my time on USgamer, let alone GamePro before that, and very few people spoke up for me to say that they had enjoyed my work. I certainly didn't get a string of adulation from former colleagues waxing poetic about past collaborations. And all that kind of hurt, frankly; I had made that site my life for the time I was there, and I was immensely proud of all that I had done. And yet when people look back on USgamer's existence now, I'm not even a footnote; I doubt anyone other than the few people who did regularly read my work there — most of whom are still online friends, I should add — would even be able to tell you that I was a founding member of the site.

I feel this under other circumstances, too. There are several Discords I'm a member of where I feel like my presence and existence is often forgotten about. I don't really have an online community that I feel like I can call "home" any more, and that is, I think, where a lot of this stems from; it's that age-old fear that, if you were to drop dead tomorrow, no-one would notice or care. (My wife, at least, would. Hopefully.)

And I don't really know how to "fix" this. As I say, my social anxiety makes it very difficult for me to step up and say "hey, hello, please pay attention to me" without feeling like I'm inconveniencing or annoying people, and as such, I continue to just sort of quietly exist in the hope that I don't get forgotten entirely.

If you're reading this, none of the above applies to you. I am grateful for your presence, your support and your friendship — because if you are reading this at this point, you are someone who is present in my life; you are someone who has, in one way or another, supported me at some point over the years; and you are someone that I'm happy to call a friend. I thank you, sincerely, from not letting me become completely invisible to the world at large.

And perhaps I should be content with that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 630: Mr Cellophane appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Now, I know there is plenty we can criticise Metacritic for, but to the site's credit, after being made aware of the situation, the review was not only pulled from Metacritic, but the site in question was blacklisted from being featured on there for future reviews, too.

The site in question was VideoGamer.com — not a site I ever particularly frequented, but one that has been around for many years, and one of many, many old games press brands that have been bought up by private equity and turned into sites filled with AI-generated drivel, usually in the form of undisclosed advertorial features pointing people towards shady gambling sites. VideoGamer is not the first site to fall in this way; previous victims have included AdventureGamers and The Escapist, and there are almost certainly countless more that we haven't found as yet.

My initial reaction to anything like this happening is to ask "why?"

Why are once-good sites being replaced with AI-generated drivel? Who do they think is reading this stuff? Why do the people in charge of these hollowed-out husks of websites think this is, in any way, a good idea?

The answer, of course, is that this is the natural endpoint of SEO-driven online writing. The sole reason these articles exist is to get people to click on them and generate advertising revenue for the site's owners. And if they can do that without having to do anything silly like pay actual people to write actual articles, so much the better! (Although the more astute among you out there may well point out that being an AI power user probably doesn't end up much cheaper than hiring an actual person — particularly in the games press, where, as Mat Jones of IGN put it earlier today, "games freelancers will turn in 2,000 words for an egg sandwich". I wish it wasn't true.)

Couple this with the news that Eurogamer and surrounding sites are suffering some considerable layoffs and things do not look altogether rosy. I also learned that VG247 is now little more than an SEO guideslop site; I never really liked that site all that much, but since most of my USgamer stuff ended up archived there after USgamer itself closed down, I do have a certain attachment to it.

The frustrating thing for me is that all this seems so unnecessary. Video games, as an industry, creative medium, art form, whatever you want to call them, are huge. One would assume that would mean they would need a specialist press around to cover them effectively, but given that so many sites have been gutted over the last few years — and, in many cases, replaced with AI slop — something doesn't quite seem to add up.

Sure, we've seen the rise of sites like Aftermath, who do good work, and it was gratifying to see Giant Bomb successfully extricate themselves from their former corporate overlords — full disclosure: I subscribe to both to support them — but neither of them quite take the place of what we used to have. And you can interpret that however you will, because the same is true if you think I'm referring to traditional "news, previews and reviews" websites, or if you think I'm referring to magazines. (Spoiler: I'm talking about both.)

Part of this feels like an extension of the whole "New Games Journalism" discussion we had in the latter-day 1up years. And while that discussion went to some odd places, I do acknowledge that there is some valuable work going on over at a number of worker-owned, reader-supported sites, particularly when it comes to telling the stories of people who work in games. But sometimes you just want to read something simple like what someone thought of a game you're interested in, y'know? And that side of things seems to very much be a dying breed.

One might argue that there's less need for that, what with social media, online discussion and "influencers" (you will never get me to not use scare quotes around that odious term) dominating the way games are promoted online these days. But I still like to read a straightforward review of something — and the continued existence of Metacritic, as flawed as it is as a concept, suggests that there's still a place for that sort of thing.

I can't help but wonder where all this will end up. With people starting to get interested in physical media once again, I would love to see proper magazines become a thing again. I suspect that won't happen, but we certainly can't go on like this. Can we? This feels like how you actually end up with a completely dead Internet.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 629: Another site falls to AI appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the things that I've particularly enjoyed about more actively engaging with YouTube over the last decade or so is coming across channels that have very much found their niche, and stick to it. Sometimes this is as simple as "gaming", but oftentimes I find that the most interesting and enjoyable channels are those that get a little more granular: those that choose to focus on a specific aspect of something that they enjoy and dive deep into that.

This can take many forms, so I want to share a few favourite channels in this regard today. Not all of them are gaming related, but all of them are run by people who have found something they enjoy doing and continue to do just that, often regardless of what "the algorithm" supposedly wants or viewing figures. I respect this because it's what I aspire to do with my channel; while my YouTube channel is broadly a "variety gaming" channel with a focus on retro, my preference is to explore overlooked and underappreciated games and platforms from over the years — and sometimes to give games that had a less than stellar reception on their original release another chance.

But I digress. This is not about me. This is about some channels I enjoy, so let's go on a little wander around YouTube, shall we?

Yesterzine

As you probably know if you've been reading this for any length of time, I enjoy old video game magazines, and as such I'm gratified to see how many people out there enjoy making videos and writing about them. One of my favourites is Yesterzine, a channel that describes itself as "The Literal Magazine Show", because it takes a "magazine show" format and is also about magazines, you see?

Presenter Dudley (who, full disclosure, I Actually Know) has a characteristically deadpan style that works well with the show's humour. He strikes a good balance between acknowledging and celebrating the original cultural context of these publications and providing appropriate modern commentary and criticism of aspects that, in retrospect, have not aged well for one reason or another.

Yesterzine videos are worth sitting down and paying attention to rather than putting on in the background, and with such a rich vein of classic magazines to draw on for future episodes, it's a show that will continue for as long as Dudley can be bothered, and he's showing no signs of slowing down just yet.

Zilog and Moto

I've always enjoyed Sega games, particularly from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. In fact, if you follow my YouTube channel, you'll notice I'm going through a bit of a Master System phase right now.

Zilog and Moto is a channel with a bold aim: to collect all the English language releases for Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, Mega CD and 32X, then play and review all of them. Presenter Dave is making good progress in both regards so far. His videos are simply presented but effective in what they do, consisting of a short introduction to camera, a look at the game's physical component and then some commentary on how it actually plays.

Dave clearly spends time with each and every game and gives it a proper chance — even in the case of notoriously bad titles. Sometimes this leads to pleasant surprises… and, of course, sometimes those poor receptions are well-deserved. Either way, an episode of Zilog and Moto is always a worthwhile watch if you're an old-school Sega fan.

League of Extraordinary Board Games

This channel, a collaborative affair between well-known tat acquirer Stuart Ashen, CheapShow's Paul Gannon and movie enthusiast Oliver Harper, has a simple premise: dig out an old, obscure board game of the ilk you would have once got at a jumble sale, then give it an honest shot to see if it's any good.

The trio doesn't always get through a full game of something — particularly if it looks like running particularly long, or if it is clear that the game itself is not actually very fun — but they always give it a chance.

It's especially interesting to see the variety of licensed board games based on TV shows — I have fond memories of these from back in the day and wish I'd held on to more of the ones that I used to have copies of. As it stands, all I still have is a copy of MB Games' adaptation of Williams' arcade game Defender.

Anyway, this has a similar feel to Gannon's CheapShow: the sense that you're being let in on a group of friends just having fun together. A good show for when you're feeling a bit lonely.

Lord Heath

I won't lie: I found Lord Heath's channel because of his frankly astonishing fart videos, one of which can optionally be enjoyed above. But I've been enjoying his other… err… output too, the majority of which are the rather more socially acceptable and/or safe for work reviews of drinks.

These are short, simple, self-explanatory videos: he tries a drink, he gives his thoughts on it. Most of them are under three minutes long, but they're all rather entertaining; Lord Heath himself is a joyfully exuberant character who is not afraid to make a twat of himself in public, and he always makes a point of shooting his videos in some pleasantly picturesque locations.

In many respects, this is perhaps the purest example of what I'm talking about today: he's clearly got a vision in his head for what his YouTube channel should be, farts and all, and he's stuck with it. He's not trying to be Internet famous; he's not trying to clickbait; he's just a cheeky chappy who likes burping, farting and trying an increasingly esoteric selection of beverages. Eternal respect to him.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 627: Finding your niche appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've known for a long time that Bussler was intensely dissatisfied with the way the online landscape had been going — and how it had meant that something he once clearly loved doing had become something that it felt like it was pointless to carry on with. After he stopped doing Classic Game Room as his main thing, he tried various other projects online, but has seemingly met with nothing but frustration with pretty much every one of them.

I still follow his Patreon for updates on what he's up to, and today he mentioned that people should have a look at his website, classicgameroom.com, to see what he's up to, since he doesn't really do social media any more. And his FAQs made me feel very sad indeed.

The question he gets more than anything else, I reckon, is "is Classic Game Room coming back?" and his answer is simple:

No. The Classic Game Room video game review series is permanently discontinued. There are no plans to bring the video series back in any way on any platform.

He expands on the reasons thus:

After the YouTube channel was largely demonetized, people stopped watching in favour of influencers and short-form videos. No other formats seemed to work. After a few different format changes, the show is now discontinued.

The cynics would say that this was just Bussler failing to adapt to the changing media landscape online, and that's not an incorrect statement to make, but the thing that makes me so sad about all this is that there is demand for stuff that isn't influencer-led short-form content. Just not enough to be commercially viable, unfortunately; not enough for one of the OG online video creators to want to continue with the thing that made him famous — and which, I suspect, is at this point completely unknown to a couple of generations of people.

Bussler worked hard on Classic Game Room and his other projects, and it must have been so frustrating for him to continually feel his efforts knocked back — particularly when he tried all manner of different things after it seemed that Classic Game Room had, for one reason or another, fallen out of favour.

So I'm sad for him. I'm sad that he has felt the need to, in his words, "permanently retire from filmmaking, game journalism and animation". At the same time, I completely understand why he has taken that decision. Again, in his own words:

Mark spends his free time reading and biking instead of using garbage social media apps. He has no patience for algorithms and prefers looking at old-fashioned paper.

I completely understand why one would want to retire from the Internet in this age of relentless, pointless, disposable short-form content. I often feel like I want to do so, too. I've spent many years carving out a little corner of the Internet that I can feel proud of with places like this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel, but sometimes it all feels incredibly pointless.

I'm sad to see someone whose work I enjoyed, and that I respected immensely, be so completely and utterly defeated by what passes for "culture" online today. I'm sad because I know how he feels. I understand why he's so frustrated. And I don't know how we fix this — or if it's even possible at this point.

Perhaps it's all part of getting old. You pass beyond a point of relevance, and the world feels like it isn't "yours" any more. Perhaps we all reach this point. But that seems like a bit of an inefficient way for everyone to live their lives. Surely there's a way for different types of "stuff" to coexist, without everything having to be dominated by whatever the latest "viral" bullshit is?

Apparently not. But oh well. I'm not going anywhere just yet. Even if no-one's reading, watching or listening, I still enjoy the act of creating something. It gives me some satisfaction — and it's perhaps for the best that I've never got to a point where I'd be tempted to try and use online content creation (ugh) as my main source of income.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 625: It sucks to see someone defeated appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"We ate EVERYTHING by [brand]!" "We try VIRAL TikTok [trend]!" "We cook STRUGGLE MEALS!" The strength of the channels I've mentioned by name above is that they generally manage to put their own distinctive twist on things — Good Mythical Morning is heavily formulaic, but has a warmth to it that is very appealing to feel like you're included in; Mythical Kitchen's chaotic energy combined with genuine cooking skills and a willingness to experiment with unconventional concoctions is always enjoyable to watch; and The Grumps is always anarchic chaos — but I won't deny that I feel my heart sink just a little when I see those same old "content" trends being recycled over and over and over.

I think my least favourite of them is anything to do with TikTok, because that inevitably devolves into a significant part of the episode being watching people watching vertical videos of other people yelling at their camera, and I already find that format of video to be uncomfortable and annoying to watch. I also tend to dislike it when one creator's work is dependent on providing commentary on another creator's work; while none of the above-mentioned channels go about this in the "wrong" way, it absolutely can be a vector for abuse and exploitation, as veteran YouTuber Jacksfilms' spinoff channel JJJacksfilms highlights regularly.

My one exception to generally disliking "reaction" videos is when it's the Grumps reacting to their own stuff. A particular highlight in this regard is always any time the musicians "Sbassbear" get involved, remixing some of the more stupid moments from the Grumps' video game show into some real toe-tappers. Not only are the remixes brilliant in their own right, but the Grumps' reactions to them are always entertaining; it's a real "laugh along with them" moment in the same way as watching out-takes in which actors completely lose the plot and get the uncontrollable giggles is appealing.

Conversely, the one instance of the things above that I do tend to feel has legs is the "We tried everything by [brand]", because there's so many different types of things out there that you can explore, and each will result in quite a different video. Consider one video trying out every type of Oreo, and another trying every variety of Buldak noodles. Very different. The trouble is, even within this particular niche, you tend to see the same brands coming up all the time — with Oreos and Buldak being two of the prime offenders in this regard. It's one reason I'm quite fond of the CheapShow podcast's "Off-Brand Brand-Off" segment, in which they try own-brand and branded varieties of a single thing in order to determine which one, if any, is the "best".

I guess there are only a finite number of ideas in the world, and if you're making YouTube your career, you have to go where both the trends and "the algorithm" take you. And I guess that means making endless "We try VIRAL TikTok recipes!" videos. Which is a bit of a shame, because we, as humans, are capable of a lot more.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 619: My kingdom for some new ideas appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is probably at least partly a "me" problem. I am the sort of person who prefers to engage in a single activity at a time. If I'm playing a game, that's all I'm doing; splitting my attention between that and a podcast, video or stream feels like I'm being disrespectful to the developers of the game; they crafted it to be paid attention to, after all, and thus I feel like the least I can do is appreciate it as intended, with my full attention.

I sometimes feel like I'm in a bit of a minority in doing this, though. People talk a lot about "second screen content" — some streamers, like the excellent Josh Strife Hayes, make a recurring joke about it — but I've tried, and I just can't do it. The way my attentiveness works is that I can pay attention to one thing or the other, not both. If I'm paying attention to the game, I'm not listening to the podcast, video or stream; if I'm paying attention to the podcast, video or stream, I'm not giving the game my full attention.

I guess part of this is down to the games I play. I don't play any multiplayer-centric games or MMOs that demand you repeat things over and over again, and thus I don't really play anything that really lends itself to dividing your attention away from it. I am, as I always have been, generally inclined towards games with interesting stories or compelling mechanics, and in both of those instances you are robbing yourself of the full experience if you're not giving those your full attention. Perhaps I might feel a bit differently if I was grinding my way through a Battle Pass (ugh) or still on the Tomestone grind in Final Fantasy XIV, but I am not doing either of those things right now. I'm not ruling out a return to Final Fantasy XIV at some point, but I'm pretty certain my days of playing that game hardcore are well and truly behind me.

I mean, I guess I could have put a podcast or video or stream on while I was playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment recently? There are some repetitive missions in that, but then there are also story missions where I want to pay attention to what's going on, and I like enjoying the whole audio-visual experience of that game: the graphics; the sound; the music; the voice acting. Now I've reached the postgame, I could feasibly grind my way through some of those challenges with divided attention, but I'm not sure I'm going to do that; I'm likely going to move on to something else instead, and maybe dip into the postgame any time I just feel like punching Moblins.

My wife, meanwhile, has YouTube videos on constantly, whether she's playing Final Fantasy XIV or whichever farming and crafting game has caught her attention recently. She even does some work sometimes, inevitably with a YouTube video on.

See, I even find it quite difficult to do work with a distraction like a video, podcast or stream; I do work quite well with a musical accompaniment, mind. I think it's the talking. If someone is talking, my mind tells me, repeatedly, pay attention to this. And if, for whatever reason, I'm not able to, I start to feel genuinely stressed out. I know this because I'm very conscious of it any time someone tries to talk to me while I'm in the middle of, say, watching a video, or TV show, or something like that. Two people talking at the same time makes my brain melt and I don't like it.

The other completely unrelated issue is that many of the streamers I might otherwise be inclined to watch are often playing games that I want to play at some point. And if I haven't played that game myself yet, I will tend to avoid anything else about it online (including reviews) until I have at least tried it for myself. That's just a habit I've fallen into — although I must admit, there have been occasions where I have watched a YouTuber like GameGrumps or ProJared play something and thought "yeah, that looks fun, I'll give it a go myself".

Because yes, it's not that I don't watch any video game stuff online at all. We quite often watch Game Grumps with lunch or dinner. But those are 20-30 minutes at most, focused on the game (well, focused on Arin and Dan's experience of playing the game, at least) and coming to a clear conclusion after a set amount of time. Your average stream, meanwhile, is several hours long and includes boring bits of downtime, shout-outs to donations and subscribers and all that stuff, and I just find all that very distracting.

I dunno. I guess I just have to come to the conclusion that there are parts of the Internet experience today that I just don't really get and probably won't ever get. And I think I'm fine with that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 617: Single screen appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I thought I'd talk about the things I mention in the video for today's post, because… well, because I want to.

The main takeaway from the update is that I'm giving up on doing longer playthroughs of stuff on video. For the most part, anyway. I'm not ruling out the possibility of doing another full playthrough of something reasonably short like an adventure game, as those are fun videos to make. But long RPGs as a playthrough series are out of the window.

There are a few reasons for this, chief among which is it makes playing one single game take for-fucking-ever. If you're only playing a game when you're recording videos for it, that inevitably means you're not playing it all that regularly (I have a life outside YouTube videos!) and thus it takes ages to get anywhere. If you combine that with a game that involves a fair amount of going back and forth grinding for experience, money or whatever, that doesn't make for particularly fun video-making, and it almost certainly doesn't make for particularly fun watching, either.

The other reason is that although I don't really care about viewing figures in general, the number of people who were showing up for episodes of The Granstream Saga in particular was utterly woeful. And, I mean, I get it; if you get an hour and a half long video in your feed that's part 7 of a series, are you going to click on it if you're not already invested? Probably not, even if the video has a link to the full series playlist in its description — because you still have to actually click on the video in the first place to know that.

So what I'm going to do is that, in future, for long games that I want to cover on the channel somehow, I'm going to make sure that I record some footage of the game while I'm playing it, then write a proper script for a "review-style" video of the game to be posted at some point afterwards. This will probably also be combined with a written version of the piece for MoeGamer, because I know that some people prefer to read and some people prefer to watch, so it just makes sense to do the same thing in both places — and that's what I've been doing with a number of recent pieces.

This means that for the "Let's Play"-style videos, which I want to keep on doing, because I think they're a good means of exploring retro games in particular, I will focus on doing one-offs. I'm not going to fret over doing "series" or sticking to one platform specifically, because there are many, many, many retro titles that I would love to talk about (in many cases while I'm trying them for the first time) and I just think it will be best for my own sanity to keep things breezy. This isn't a job, after all, it's a hobby. Were I relying more seriously on income from YouTube, I'd be 1) fucked and 2) making a lot more effort to bait the algorithm, post consistently and all that other gubbins. But I'm not, so I don't.

Regular readers will know that I've been wrestling internally over what exactly to do with the YouTube channel for a long time. I enjoyed the period back in about 2018-2020 or so when I was doing up to five videos a week and specific series such as Atari A To Z, Atari A to Z Flashback and suchlike, but it's also pleasing when the scripted videos perform well — and they tend to do a lot better than the Let's Play-style stuff in general.

But, as I say, I think the Let's Play-style format is a good means of showcasing and explaining retro games. My "vision", if you want to be pretentious about it, is that of me sitting down with you, the viewer, to "go on the computer" and explore a game together. I have very, very fond memories of having friends over after school to "go on the computer" and play games together; in many cases, these were single-player games, and we'd take turns, or my friend would watch and ask questions, and what I at least attempt to recapture the feeling of with my Let's Play-style videos is that sort of thing.

So that's the plan. Go back to/keep doing one-shot Let's Play-style videos of Stuff I Just Find Interesting, then scripted review-style videos of stuff that benefits from being explored in a bit more depth, or which is too long to practically sit down and commentate over the entire duration of.

It was important for me to make this video, if only to "give myself permission" to admit that some things weren't working, and I didn't need to ride them out to the bitter end just for the sake of pride or whatever. I already feel like I've lifted an entirely self-inflicted weight off my shoulders by doing so, and hopefully this will mean some renewed enthusiasm for Doing YouTube in the coming weeks.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 608: Channel update appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To both of these individuals, I extend my middle finger in an unmistakeable gesture and invite them, politely, to eat an entire bag of dicks. Because neither of these people were up for any sort of discussion — not that I wanted to discuss their odious viewpoints with them — and just wanted to spew a wall of vitriol at me before flouncing off into the sunset, likely to never think of me ever again. And I'm 100% fine with that last bit.

The first bit is a shitty thing to have to deal with, though. I, unfortunately, know quite a few people who have been on the receiving end of abusive messages from people like these two fucknuggets, and none of them have deserved what they have gotten. The people who spew this kind of hatefulness are, without exception, bigoted, intolerant fuckheads who are angry that the world doesn't cater specifically to them. They don't like that certain types of people who are different from them exist, whether those differences come in the form of their skin colour, gender identity, sexuality or how many YouTube subscribers they have. They are angry at the simple existence of people they see as different from them; they think these differences make those people somehow dangerous.

They fear them, and that's why they lash out in the way they do — they hope to break the spirit of people they have decided that they dislike. They have no endgame; no real purpose in mind. They just want to hurt people. And it's fucking pathetic. Particularly because the targets they pick, like me, are, frankly, completely harmless individuals who they likely never would have come into contact with were it not for the increasingly potholed Information Superhighway.

It sucks that we have to tolerate the existence of pathetic little trolls like this, because practically speaking, there's not a lot that can really be done about them. Law enforcement aren't interested in some mean messages on the Internet, social media platforms are increasingly lawless zones, and hosting your own sites means you have the joy of having to deal with moderation tasks yourself. At least WordPress and YouTube make it easy enough to block commenters via various means.

It's a shitty world out there, both online and offline, and there are days when it doesn't feel like there's anything worth "saving" any more. If you encounter any little shits like the ones I've described today, my best advice is to remember that their pathetic little lives are almost certainly full of more self-inflicted misery than you can possibly imagine, and that they're lashing out precisely because of that fact because they're unwilling to admit that they're at fault. Once you start down the path of being an Internet Dickhead, it's very difficult to pull yourself back and save face. Because, frankly, even if these two clagnuts came to me with a genuine apology tomorrow, I would not have the time of day for them.

You get one chance in life to make a first impression, and if that first impression is violently shitting yourself while screaming and waving a knife around, I'm not going to let you into my house, ever.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 596: Sad little men appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have not felt at all like making any videos for a while, which is a little bit frustrating to me, because the first two episodes of my Space Rogue playthrough actually did surprisingly decent (for my channel) numbers, and I reckon there's just one or two episodes more of The Granstream Saga to do before that's all finished. I just haven't quite been able to summon up the energy to continue those recently, not helped by a week of feeling ill that I'm just getting over.

However, with a soft embargo date approaching for Super Woden Rally Edge, a game I wanted to cover — the video I made on this game's previous installment is the best-performing video on my channel by a long shot — I felt a bit more inspired to actually do something today. So I recorded a bunch of voiceovers: both for this, and for some other things that I've previously written articles for, but wanted to turn them into videos. All in all, I've recorded voiceovers for Super Woden Rally Edge, Old Skies, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 2009 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, which should result in a nice spread of 15-20 minute videos for each. I've even edited the Super Woden Rally Edge and Old Skies ones already, but I'm going to leave the Wolfenstein ones to another time — maybe tomorrow, maybe later in the week, depending on how I'm feeling.

I continue to go back and forth on what is "best" to do for my YouTube channel. Up until now, I've built it on Let's Play-style playthroughs of games, and I think a lot of my viewers like that sort of thing, particularly as I make an effort to explain how to play the game, why it's interesting, why it's still relevant (if it's an old game, which it usually is) and what I, personally, think of it. These are fairly easy to record and edit, but they are time- and energy-consuming to produce, since they do involve me sitting and playing a game, often for quite a long time, and attempting to find meaningful things to say for the duration.

At the same time, the pre-scripted videos tend to overall do better, particularly over the long term. I think I'm probably more "proud" of those overall, too, since they involve more in the way of editing, and delivering a voiceover is a different skill overall to off-the-cuff, unprepared commentary while playing "live". However, they take a lot more time to both prepare and edit, since there is often a lot of miscellaneous footage required to capture along with the footage of the main thing I'm covering, and the editing process involves a lot more in creatively finding ways to visually represent the things I'm talking about.

Part of me wants to commit to one or the other of these approaches, because I feel it would probably be a good idea to. At the same time, I think there's value in both approaches; you can show things in "live gameplay" that you can't show in a "video essay"-style production, and vice versa.

I do, however, think that kicking off long playthroughs again might have been a mistake. The videos for The Granstream Saga have performed more poorly than anything I've done for a long time, although, as I say, the first couple of episodes of Space Rogue did surprisingly well. So I'm inching towards abandoning those, though I feel like at this point I probably should finish The Granstream Saga at the very least.

Anyway, that's something to think about another day. I have enough on my plate with these new videos for now, so watch for them coming soon to my channel!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 582: Getting some mojo back appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

So much for new year, new beginnings. Just the last week has seen all manner of fresh hell being served up, particularly across the pond in America, but these things have the potential to affect everyone in the world, directly or indirectly.

The first thing I want to acknowledge is America's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror group murdering someone in cold blood in Minneapolis today. I have no real words to express what I feel about the continually declining situation in the States right now, and as someone who has relatives who live there, I am frightened. I can't even begin to imagine how people who live there in the knowledge that this horrendous shit is going down must be feeling right now.

That's about all I can say about that for the moment, because that situation is still ongoing. I at least wanted to acknowledge it, however, because it's just one of many things that have been going horribly, horribly wrong recently, making it clear that 2026 is not going to offer any sort of respite from the general shitshow the 2020s have been so far. I hope the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice, and that this can be the starting point for the people of the United States to take their country back — by force, if necessary — from an increasingly, dangerously unhinged administration.

The main thing I want to talk about today is Grok, the generative AI large language model attached to X, the child sexual abuse material and revenge porn platform formerly known as the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Grok has been trouble ever since Elon Musk, idiot-in-chief of The Everything App, decided that he needed to make it Cool and Based, and not subject to those pesky guardrails that the boring folks at OpenAI and Anthropic were doing. (Guardrails which, I will add, are consistently failing, as people keep dying as a result of following chatbot "advice" when it comes to drugs and suicidal ideation. But that's beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today.)

If you've somehow missed what's been going on, Grok, ostensibly an on-platform AI able to provide additional context and explanation to a post if someone asks it to chip in, is being used to a frightening degree to produce non-consensual pornography based on real people's photographs — including those of minors. And it has been complying with these requests, posting uncensored nude and lingerie-bikini clad images of women and girls who had previously posted perfectly normal, innocent images of themselves online.

Not only that, but the "community" has been quickly finding ways around what little guardrails Grok does have in place, as reported by the excellent 404 Media, one of the best, most rigorous sources in tech journalism today. For example, Grok supposedly won't generate an image of someone covered in cum, but it will happily comply with a request to "donut glaze" someone, as reported by Eliot Higgins in a lengthy thread on Bluesky earlier today.

There's been disturbingly little critical reporting of this from the media, too. There was a half-arsed attempt to cover the situation during which multiple news outlets unironically said that "Grok apologised" for producing the inappropriate material, when, as a large language model, it is not capable of doing such a thing. The "apologies" posted were simply responses to further prompts, and the insincerity of them was emphasised by someone also prompting it to basically post a Cool and Based "deal with it" kind of response immediately after the initial "apology".

X, The Everything App, so far appears to have done little to curtail the issue. Indeed, if you go click on Grok's profile right now — don't do that — and look at the replies tab, you will almost certainly see a request to put a non-consenting woman in a bikini within two or three posts, if not as the very first post you see. This has been done to a vast number of people so far, including celebrities, public figures, individuals just posting selfies and, yes, minors. And, as one might expect, it has been overwhelmingly women that have received this treatment.

This has been absolutely revolting to see, and although I left Twitter behind myself long ago for a variety of reasons, I am still obliged to check in on it every so often for the day job. And I kind of feel sickened to have to do that; I have absolutely no desire to associate the brand I work for, which I actually care about, with a platform that is seemingly okay with the material I've just been describing. If it were up to me, I would remove the brand from the platform entirely, but unfortunately that is not my decision to make — and thankfully, at some point hopefully not too long away, I will be stepping away from having to deal with social media entirely, in favour of some new responsibilities at the company I will enjoy a lot more.

But if you still have a Twitter account on the grounds that "your audience is still there", let me be blunt: no, they are not. Anyone with any decency abandoned that hellsite long before this latest nonsense started to be a thing, because they could see how things were going a mile off. I wish I could say I was surprised that Grok ended up being used for non-consensual deepfake revenge porn of minors, but I am not.

Back in 2023, I wrote about how I'm not surprised so many people become misanthropes in this day and age, and how I had pretty much lost faith in my fellow man. Things haven't gotten any better since then. In fact, they've become much, much worse. If you've ever thought "ah, no, that's ridiculous, there's no way that'd ever happen", then I'm sorry to say that it probably has already. And then some edgelord shithead has "donut glazed" it just to add insult to injury.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 579: Fresh hell appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We mock Donny Trump's obsession with "fake news" because he always busts that out whenever someone criticises him, but it's an unfortunate fact of life that we are living in a world that is riddled with misinformation right now — particularly if you're the sort of person who primarily gets their information from social media. And, distressingly, that is quite a lot of people these days.

Not all bits of misinformation are dangerous, of course, but they're no less frustrating to see. The other day, for example, I saw a post on Bluesky where someone commented that someone waxing nostalgic over the original Quake for being "from the days before you needed to spend thousands on graphics cards" or suchlike was "the funniest game they could have picked to comment this on". Funny! Except Quake didn't need a 3D accelerator card, as it ran entirely in software, meaning that while a decent non-3D graphics card would help in unlocking graphics modes, it was primarily dependent on how good your CPU was. Its 3D-accelerated version was never officially supported, despite being developed by id Software, and was primarily put out as a test for what they were planning to do with Quake II, which was 3D-accelerated by default.

Likewise, when a near-complete version of Resident Evil for Game Boy Color was unearthed and released to the public the other day, there were people talking about how it "included" the pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 version (it doesn't, they are low-resolution pixel art recreations) and how it "used the same isometric perspective" as the PS1 version (neither the PS1 nor the GBC versions are depicted from an isometric perspective).

I didn't comment on either of these at the time because that would have made me an "Um Actually" guy, and no-one wants to be one of those. But as someone who cares about this stuff — particularly about game history, and modern folks appreciating the many varied and wonderful things that classic games were doing — it was frustrating to see these statements go completely unchallenged.

The problem, as I've already alluded to, is people seeing someone saying something on social media and then immediately taking that as gospel truth without verifying it for themselves. In cases such as the above, perhaps younger people might not know what they would need to search for in order to verify those things — or indeed even if they needed verifying in the first place. Neither of those cases particularly matter in the grand scheme of things, but they're a microcosm of times when more serious misinformation — misinformation that could, say, seriously damage someone's reputation — has found itself spreading in one way or another.

They say "the Internet never forgets" — and with the sterling work the Internet Archive does, that's mostly true. Unfortunately, this sometimes means that the Internet never forgets something that was wrong in the first place. And once that misinformation takes root among enough people as being "the truth" — or, perhaps more accurately, "good enough" to sound like the truth — it's very hard to dig it out again to correct things, because not only does no-one like an "Um Actually" guy, even when they're correct, people are simply very resistant to having their assumptions challenged and corrected.

That feels like it might be a problem we should deal with sooner rather than later. But how…?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 561: A world of misinformation appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've had to block two different people on two different platforms today, both for the same reason: showing up uninvited and spewing some sort of borderline-abusive quasi-scolding because they happen to disagree with something rather innocuous that I had said. The details don't really matter — though if you must know, they really were innocuous opinions, firstly on the fact that localisation into English is not "censorship" (which it isn't, and if you're already typing an angry comment, I invite you to stop, take a deep breath, and just leave), and secondly, that it was surprising someone with terrible handwriting and an obvious lack of care in what they were writing could actually spell a rather complicated surname correctly. Hardly the stuff of epic meltdowns, I'm sure you'll agree — although the localisation topic does tend to bring some of the absolute worst people on the Internet out of the woodwork.

I have a zero tolerance policy for rudeness these days. If a complete stranger were to show up at my door and start hurling abuse at me, I would slam the door in their face. And as such, if a complete stranger decides to show up at my digital door online and start hurling abuse, I will gladly slam that door in their face, too. The platforms on which I blocked these two particularly odious individuals today — my other site MoeGamer, and my Bluesky account — both have pretty robust self-moderation tools that allow you to put nasty little piggies out of sight, out of mind, permanently.

My favourite moderation tool in this regard is YouTube's "Hide user from channel" function. YouTube does many, many stupid things, but this little option is a work of genius. Effectively acting as a shadowban, using this function on a user not only makes the comment you used it on disappear from everyone else's screens, including yours, it also prevents any future comments from that person from appearing on any of your videos. However — and here's the good bit — the user in question has no indication that this has happened to them, meaning they can quite happily continue spewing their hateful rhetoric "at you", and you will remain completely oblivious, while they inevitably get more and more frustrated. This is just delightful.

But you know what? I'm tired. It sucks that these mechanisms have to be in place for a quiet life online these days. And I'm increasingly fatigued with the very idea of putting myself out there — for what, exactly? — only to get chucklefucks who are incapable of responding to a post without resorting to The Usborne Big Book of Logical Fallacies crapping up the comments sections.

I don't do anything online with the intention of pissing people off, or even being a little bit provocative. I'm honest about things — I'm honest about the person I am, I'm honest about the things I feel and believe, and I'm honest about the things I enjoy. The thing I am most honest about is that I have absolutely zero desire to argue with anyone online, which is why, as a general rule, on platforms such as my YouTube channel and MoeGamer, I make a specific effort to focus on the good and the positive.

Yes, I rant and rave and complain a fair bit here — I will freely admit that! — but this place is for me. It's my place for self-expression, for self-therapy, for processing my own thoughts, feelings and emotions, and it just happens to be publicly accessible. That does not mean I crave sweaty Internet-poisoned dudes in my mentions arguing with everything I say. I am more than enough sweaty Internet-poisoned dude for myself; I certainly don't need any more.

It might be time for another social media break over the holidays. I've already dialled things back a lot from where I was, which is good. But the holidays promise to be a nice time with family, so I'm looking forward to enjoying the peace and quiet. And that peace and quiet will have to be, at least partly, of my own creation.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 550: I'm so tired of online appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The review embargo for the "Analogue 3D" FPGA-based N64 clone system came up yesterday, and as is usually the case with such things, about a bazillion reviews all dropped at the same time. The machine looks like a nifty bit of kit — although calling your brand "Analogue" and then not actually having any analogue outputs on your device is a bit weird — and has been reviewing well. As an owner of a MiSTer Multisystem 2, I have no real need for one — just as well, since ordering Analogue stuff is an absolute fucking nightmare — but I'm glad this thing exists and, moreover, appears to be pretty cool.

What has been less cool are the inevitable arguments that have been breaking out in the comments of pretty much every single video and article I have seen on this thing. It's utterly ridiculous to see grown men (and I would place good money on it being all men) of a certain age all getting pissy over how different people choose to experience retro games.

Here's my feelings on the subject: I don't care. Really! I do not give the slightest shit, so long as you're having a good time and you aren't causing anyone else any trouble.

If you want to set yourself up with a MiSTer stack you built yourself, fab. If you want to buy a MiSTer Multisystem 2 to take the hard work out of building an FPGA device, great. If you want to buy a SuperStation One, I hope you love it. If you're running Batocera on a mini PC, more power to you. If you do all your retro gaming on an Anbernic handheld running its stock OS, have fun. If you've spent several weeks finding the perfect alternative operating system for an Anbernic handheld, I hope you've had a fulfilling time doing so. If you're an original hardware junkie with a massive physical collection, can I come and visit? If you have your childhood console and nothing but an Everdrive, amazing! And I'm probably contractually obliged to mention that if your experience with retro gaming begins and ends with an Evercade or Super Pocket handheld, that is 100% fine, too.

Y'see, the important thing with enjoying retro games, to me, is, funnily enough, the games themselves. So long as you're able to experience the games you want to play in the way you enjoy experiencing them, it absolutely does not matter how anyone else wants to do it.

And yet you just have to look through any of these comment threads to see the FPGA nuts arguing with passionate advocates for RetroArch; Windows vs Mac OS vs various flavours of Linux; "download for free!" types against "I prefer to buy official rereleases" people. Basically, if there are two opposing viewpoints possible in this area — and there are quite a few of those — you can count on representatives of those viewpoints all yelling at one another.

Why? Why does it matter to you that some people think the Analogue 3D is a cool device, and you don't? Why does it matter to you that you use software emulation on your Mac and some people prefer to use an FPGA solution?

It's just another example of the Internet being constantly, unnecessarily adversarial, and it's really rather tiresome. As I say, so far as I'm concerned, I have no personal pressing need for an Analogue 3D, as I already have a suitable solution for enjoying N64 games in place — but I absolutely, definitely do not begrudge anyone their desire to add one to their collection! So if you happen to be one of the people lucky enough to have one coming your way soon, I sincerely, absolutely hope you enjoy it. And that you play Beetle Adventure Racing if you haven't already.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 530: My way is always better appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Apparently the erstwhile Twitter and Bluesky founder Jack Dorsey has funded a relaunch of the social video service Vine in the form of "diVine", a new app/service that not only does what Vine did, but also has an archive of "more than 100,000" Vine videos from before the service shut down.

Vine, for the unfamiliar, was a service where you could post six-second looping videos. And that was pretty much it.

Some people I've seen are really excited about this and I do not understand it. To my eye, Vine's six-second videos were not only the height of pointlessness, they were the beginning of one of my least favourite evolutions of the Web: the obsession with "short-form content" that has led us to today's TikTok-obsessed society, and the fact that some people would inexplicably rather get their news in vertical video form from someone holding a camera too close to their face, yelling and presenting subtitles for what they're saying one word at a time in an obnoxiously loud font.

To some folks, Vine was the height of comedy, and I still don't get it. I've seen supposedly popular Vine skits and found them painfully unfunny. To others, it was a place to enjoy music loops, but I'd rather listen to full tracks rather than six-second loops. To others still, I'm sure it was a place to perv on girls dancing (which is, to this day, one of the first things many people suggest to me when I indicate my distaste for TikTok), but if I want to get my rocks off to sexy girls, the Internet has been built on that for decades.

When Vine was originally a thing, I downloaded it to see what all the supposed fuss was about, but deleted it in less than an hour after completely failing to understand the appeal. I had absolutely no desire to make six-second videos of my own, and the six-second videos the app had put in front of me as a new user did not convince me of the platform's value as a means of expressing oneself.

Like I say: to me, Vine was the beginning of the brain-addled, attention-deficit Internet of today, where no-one is capable of focusing on anything for more than about six seconds. I didn't want to support it back then, and I'm certainly not celebrating it coming back now.

Interestingly, this sort of ties in with something else I wanted to talk about, which was that Metroid Prime 4 previews have been met with a certain degree of consternation following the reveal of an apparently quite annoying "sidekick" character. I can't comment on whether or not he actually is annoying myself as I haven't really looked into any of the coverage as yet, but what I did find interesting was the following Bluesky post:

"Nag lines" are those moments when a sidekick or companion character continually bugs you to do something in a video game, with one of the most notorious examples being the now-elderly "Shoot the Hinges" YouTube video. These days they tend to be a little more elaborate, but they're widely disliked by a lot of people for either stating the obvious or giving away things that the player could have otherwise discovered organically. In some cases, games that launched with extensive "nag lines" ended up patching them out after people complaining — Alexa Ray Corriea, author of the above Bluesky post, cites Horizon: Forbidden West as just one example.

But she also has a point. Nag lines are there because of the not-unreasonable assumption that a statistically significant proportion of people playing a game aren't really paying attention. Whether it's because they're listening to a podcast, watching a YouTube video or stream, scrolling through social media, posting in group chats, flipping through TikTok, swiping people on Tinder or whatever it is people do these days, their attention isn't 100% on the game, because today's Internet practically encourages you to act like an ADHD squirrel rather than settling down and focusing on anything.

And to me, Vine was the beginning of that. Actually, that's not quite true; I was very resistant to joining Twitter in the beginning, because I wasn't a big fan of the microblogging format for similar reasons, but I got over that and found some value there. Vine, though… I never found that value there. I never understood what it was for, or what the appeal was. And I firmly believe that Vine and its subsequent imitators like TikTok had an incredibly adverse effect on anyone who found themselves addicted to them, because they normalised and commodified short-form content and turned people into dribbling consumers of content.

I feel like this is a problem we need to address. Actually, I feel like we're long overdue addressing it. Because at the moment the norm, particularly in big-budget triple-A games, which is where "nag lines" are most frequently heard, is to pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of attention span and intelligence, and that results in experiences that are annoying and patronising to anyone even slightly above that minimum basic standard.

But the statistics back it up, unfortunately. Do you know the most depressing YouTube analytic? It's "watch time", which indicates that a significant number of people will click into a video, watch it for less than ten seconds and then click away. The same is true with websites; the assumption — which is, unfortunately, not too far from the truth — is that people will decide whether or not to stick around within less than five seconds.

There is so much competing for our attention online at any given moment, and the modern Internet has conditioned many of us to believe that we must consume as much content as possible, as quickly as possible. A member of a Discord I'm in once proudly explained how they "kept up" with all the content they wanted to consume, and it was a frankly terrifying account of watching some things at double speed, trusting AI summaries (which, let's not forget, are frequently wrong) and never actually taking time to really enjoy and digest something.

I am, at least, thankful that the entire world hasn't gone the short-form, attention deficit route. I am presently playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and that game couldn't be further away from this whole philosophy if it tried. No nag lines, no pressuring you to constantly be doing, no constantly rewarding you for every little meaningless thing you do, no achievements, no social features — just a big ol' world to explore, with lots of things scattered throughout it that you'll only ever stumble across by accident if you're being curious, taking your time and really drinking everything in. (I say all this with the caveat that the Switch 2 version features a certain amount of ADHD gaming features such as a "daily bonus" you can access via your mobile phone, but all this stuff is easily ignored — and by that I mean "it doesn't appear unless you specifically ask for it", not "it only does a few little pop-ups" — and can be turned off altogether if you find it intrusive.)

I've said many times over the last couple of decades that I don't feel like the modern world is built for me at all. And I mean that in numerous different ways. I am thankful that I still have a few ways to escape from the sheer manic energy of it all, but I worry that one day it won't be possible to hide from all this any longer.

In the meantime, "diVine" can go fuck itself. Actually, no. I will give it a moment's praise for the fact it is specifically weeding out AI-generated slop and not allowing it on the platform. But then I will still tell it to go fuck itself.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 525: Less than diVine appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I play a lot of classic games on my YouTube channel, and that's not going to be changing any time soon. But I'm always pondering interesting new things I might be able to do with the channel, and something popped into my head earlier.

What if I do some videos specifically about programming in Atari BASIC, with an aim to showcasing what an interesting, flexible language it is — particularly compared to some other micros' BASICs — and basing the videos on the numerous tutorials published in magazines like Page 6 and Atari User? (Crediting the original writers, obviously.)

My thinking behind it comes from several perspectives: one, there is a niche interest "market" in videos about programming for classic computers, as evidenced by the thoroughly lovely Yawning Angel Retro channel, who specialises in programming the Amiga with the AMOS language.

Two, I just think it would be an interesting twist on what I do on the channel.

Three, I will probably learn something from it — albeit something that may not necessarily be especially "useful" in the modern world.

Four, it's something to do with the magazines I've been acquiring besides just doing flipthroughs of them (which I also intend to keep doing on an occasional basis).

And five, it's something a bit different to do with the computer stuff. I'm not exactly bored of doing the games — there are still myriad titles I haven't covered on both Atari 8-bit and ST! — but I have reached a point where I want to do something a little different. This is part of the reason I've done so much console stuff on the channel recently — that and the MiSTer Multisystem 2 making it so easy to capture from all manner of different platforms — but I'm always conscious that the backbone of my channel was built on Atari home computer stuff.

I think I will try an experiment in the coming weeks and months. I will start with the absolute basics (no pun intended) for the sake of those who have never programmed in '70s/'80s computer BASIC, and gradually move on to the Atari specialisms: graphics, sound, manipulating the Display List, Player/Missile Graphics and all manner of other things. Some of these things I've never understood, so I feel like taking the time to make a video version of some of these tutorials may well allow me to improve and advance my own knowledge — something I've always kind of wanted to do, but never really made the time for.

In time, maybe I'll even be able to Snorkify some Atari BASIC games. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we…?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 508: Pondering a new video idea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

You know sometimes you find yourself on the Web, idly browsing through nonsense, pointedly avoiding social media, and you occasionally stumble across something that is not exactly important, but which you nonetheless feel like talking about? That's me with the website Wikitubia, a website which is, as the name suggests, a wiki about YouTubers and streamers.

In particular, I'm exceedingly fond of the "Quotes" section many pages sport, which quote the subjects of their page saying things that are regarded as somehow "noteworthy". Except I don't believe Wikitubia has any sort of "notability" criteria for these quotes, which means you end up with a list of complete non-sequiturs, devoid of context, that, more often than not, do not paint a particularly rosy picture of the YouTuber or streamer in question.

As an example, here's the list for the YouTuber "Jerma985", someone I have never watched and do not particularly care to watch, especially after reading this list of quotes — which, as the red scrollbar on the right suggests, is not the entire list:

Not exactly Shakespeare, is it? But then I'm not expecting a YouTuber to be Shakespeare. I just find it endlessly amusing that these specific quotes are picked out as being somehow "iconic" of the person in question. Of this list, I feel like Jerma comes off particularly well with "HEY, how about you suck a fart out of my ass?" and "Merry Christmas, motherfucker!" Truly one of the great philosophers of our time.

Let's do another one! Here's a selection from Videogamedunkey, a YouTuber I specifically dislike for a litany of reasons:

This one is a particularly good example of what I'm talking about here, containing such pearls of wisdom as "GOTCHA!", "YOU BITCH" and "Aww, shit". As I'm sure you are aware, Videogamedunkey not only popularised these iconic phrases through saying them often enough to be quoted on Wikitubia, he actually invented all of them. Yes he did. He really did. (No he didn't.)

Another! In the interests of fairness, let's do someone I like. But that means I have to find someone I like who is listed on Wikitubia and who has a Quotes section. Bear with me a moment (grawr)… nothing for LGR, nowt for Classic Game Room, nada for Good Mythical Morning, I bet Game Grumps has something, though… nope, nothing for them either… Ah, here we go. ProJared!

If you're wondering where that random epic rant about "cancel culture" in the middle came from, it was from his extremely well-measured response to some exceedingly nasty allegations that were made against him in 2019 — allegations which he later comprehensively disproved, leading to one of the most impressive redemption arcs I've seen in the online space.

While I know some folks have an issue with the term "cancel culture" due to it often being abused by the worst people on the Internet today, 2019 was a time when the term "cancelling someone" was at its height, particularly among those who were doing their best to destroy someone's reputation. It was often paired with the "crab rave" GIF and coupled with hashtags along the lines of #[name]isoverparty, celebrating the "death" of someone's career online.

Aside from that… again, not a particularly solid list of quotes, is it? I mean, "I'm playing X" and "'Ey girl, what's up? You wanna fuck?" are hardly the sort of thing great literature is made from, are they?

Anyway, Wikitubia is kind of stupid and its Quotes section is even more stupid. But it is, at least, a little bit amusing. And no, I'm not on there. I'm not nearly noteworthy enough, even for Wikitubia — although I must say, I am kind of surprised that some of the particularly annoying people my wife occasionally watches (several of whom have millions of subscribers) are nowhere to be seen, either. I guess it's because the vast majority of Wikitubia seems to be gaming-related YouTubers and streamers, perhaps unsurprisingly. Gaming enthusiasts are exactly the sort of nerds who would compile a list of stupid quotes from people they watch online, after all.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 497: Not exactly Shakespeare appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am going to leave names and specifics out of the following for reasons that will become obvious, but I wanted to talk about this today.

It is always satisfying to see someone you know is Not A Nice Person get their due comeuppance. And that has very much been happening over the course of the last few days.

The other day, I received a promotional email from a publisher extolling the virtues of their latest book. Again, I am redacting details for reasons that should hopefully become obvious, but those who follow these things will probably know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyway, as part of that promotional email, the company boasted of its author, whom they described as "one of the most respected" in their field. I vaguely recognised the name, so I did a bit of Googling and confirmed that they were, in fact, the person who I thought they were: a thoroughly unpleasant individual with whom I had enjoyed a run-in or two in the past, and who I was exceedingly disappointed to see was now a published author with an actual book to their name.

I won't lie, I was initially a little despondent at this — my thought process was something along the lines of "if a person as awful as that can get published, I should probably get my act together and do something worthwhile".

For context, this person is someone whom I used to respect, probably about ten years ago at this point. I respected them even more after they went on a bit of a self-reflection trip and posted a rather moving blog post about how they recognised they had not treated some of the people around them terribly well, and that they wanted to do better from thereon.

I drifted away from their work for various reasons, and some years later I rediscovered them, finding them to be considerably more abrasive and downright unpleasant than they had ever been before. Wondering if I had imagined the self-reflective blog post that I had found so moving and admirable a few years back, I tried to look it up. It had gone. To make doubly sure that I wasn't imagining things, I found it on the Internet Archive. So this individual had reflected on their self-reflection, gone "nah" and turned back into the person they had once been, only infinitely worse.

I happened to politely disagree with their opinion on something at one point, only to find myself on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse. When I blocked them as a result of this, they took to harassing me with multiple sockpuppet accounts, ostensibly for their various "projects" but also clearly not the first time they had been used for this purpose. It was at that point — well before it, to be perfectly honest — that this person whom I had once respected was all but dead to me. Any respect I had once had for them was well and truly in the past; they were, for whatever reason, a completely changed person, and not for the better. They had become arrogant, abusive, bigoted and generally… well, Not A Nice Person.

And so I was gratified to see that their new book had ended up in the hands of someone absolutely willing to tear this person's work a multitude of new assholes. There's a truly epic thread over on Bluesky dissecting this book and its many failings — to such a degree that I no longer feel bad about the person in question having got themselves published. I know I can do better than that. I have done better than that. I will do better than that.

This thread seemingly acted as the catalyst for a variety of people to come out of the woodwork and admit they had always thought the individual in question was a bit of a wrong'un, and I felt vindicated in what I have been quietly feeling about them for the last few years. I felt pleased that other people finally saw them for the person they really are. And, I won't lie, I laughed when I saw that the person in question had quietly nuked their entire Bluesky presence following this thread and all the people who had raised their head to speak out against them.

I'm generally not a fan of dogpiling and harassment. But that's not what has happened in this instance; the person hasn't had abuse hurled at them, nor have they been harassed. It's just been a bunch of people explaining to others, curious about the book in question, how they had always had misgivings about this individual — and how they, like me, feel particularly vindicated in feeling that way, given what others have said.

You shouldn't bully and harass people. But sometimes people really deserve to get their comeuppance for behaving like a complete shit. And that is what has happened here.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 484: Comeuppance appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

We have safely returned home. It is good to see the cats again, both of whom are very pleased to see us, but it is a shame that our holiday is over. (Well, technically Andie has one more day, but she has to spend it taking her mother home, so it's not a day she's going to be able to enjoy to the fullest.) I am back to work tomorrow, and already not really looking forward to logging back in to Microsoft fucking Teams, the most depressing application you can install on any computer. But oh well. It's a living and all that.

I have, as should hopefully be abundantly clear at this point, very much enjoyed my time away. It was some very much needed rest, relaxation and complete disconnection from anything to do with the Internet aside from this here blog and MoeGamer, which I wrote a couple of things on over the course of my time off.

And it was nice! I didn't once find myself habitually reaching for my phone in the hope of checking Bluesky, which I had already removed from the device some days prior to us departing. I didn't even really check the news, RSS feeds, websites or YouTube all that much while I was away, either. It was a blissful reminder that many of us voluntarily (or by necessity) corral ourselves off into insular little pockets of existence on a daily basis, and sometimes it is helpful and healthy to break completely free of all that, remind yourself that the world is a much bigger and nicer place than anything accessible via a URL or an app might lead you to believe, and just take the time to take a bit of pleasure in your own existence, and that of the people you care about.

The main reason I'm not relishing the prospect of going back to work is that it effectively forces me back into that little bubble, though I'm not going to be reactivating my Bluesky account any time soon. It is tempting to do so just to share the things I write and the videos I make, but I know all too well that "just sharing things" all too quickly turns into that detestable dependence on social media in the search for apparent meaning to one's existence, and never finding it there.

There are people I've enjoyed chatting with on Bluesky, for sure. But I'm also thoroughly over the "public town square" model of social media, with everyone vying for attention in the same frustratingly predictable ways. As good as it is that Bluesky has mostly remained resistant to the more obnoxious end of the horrible people that now dominate Twitter, there are still plenty of odious behaviours on display over there, and I'm just so tired of it all. I feel no need to engage with it; no enjoyment from engaging with it. And so I'm just… not going to.

In an ideal world, I'd be able to disconnect completely from social media from a professional perspective, too. I would love to be able to abandon social media responsibilities for the day job because I absolutely fucking hate doing those rounds each week and feel my time could be pretty much infinitely better spent doing literally anything else. That's probably a difficult conversation I'm going to have to raise carefully, though. Something to aim for, at least.

In the meantime, it will be nice to sleep a night in my own bed again, and enjoy the dearly beloved company of my wonderful cats. They were the only thing missing from a truly heavenly week away, so it is good to be back with them.

Now, onwards to life once again.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 465: Home again appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hello! Tomorrow I am going on holiday, and I am using this as something of a "cutoff point" in an attempt to improve my own mental health and get me out of a rut I've been feeling for a long time at this point. I have written about this previously, but please consider this a "final warning" of sorts.

This isn't intended to be a dramatic flouncing off into the sunset in the hope that someone will take pity on me. It is simply a statement of what I intend to do, because my present online existence is absolutely crippling my mental health, and I need to do something proactive to resolve the situation.

Day in, day out, I feel beaten down and depressed by the constant negativity online, and a big part of it is my own fault for engaging with platforms where negativity gets rewarded. But it's not just that; everyone has been exceedingly down for a long time now, at least partly due to the disruption we all suffered during the COVID years, not to mention the horrible things going on in politics and society in general right now. And that, unfortunately, often means that communities I would otherwise enjoy being a part of often find themselves being relentlessly negative.

It's not a malicious attempt by anyone to drag everyone else down, but that often ends up being the net effect. And continually being surrounded by that has not been healthy for me.

And so, as loathe as I am to further isolate myself in a world where I already feel like I've lost most of my "real life" friends, I am going to be taking the following steps for my own digital wellbeing:

• I will be deactivating my Bluesky account for at the very least the duration of my holiday.
• I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of.
• I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
• I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don't know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number. I also occasionally pop in to the Giant Bomb forums as "angryjedi".

I am sorry to disappoint the two people who were enjoying my #365games thread on Bluesky.

I would also like to add that none of this is personal and that none of this has been triggered by a particular individual. This is all a "me" thing that I've been thinking about for a while; an attempt to reclaim my own life and brain from the digital realm.

As noted above, it's not as if I am going to disappear completely. I can still be contacted via the above means, and I encourage you to do so! It'd be nice to have a private conversation with some of you, away from the noise of social media, so drop me an email or a direct message if that sounds like something you might like. I would certainly appreciate it.

Anyway, that's that. I will be taking the above steps this evening before I go to bed, so I can start my holiday "fresh" in the morning. Thanks for your time and attention, and I hope I'll hear from some of you via non-social media means soon!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 457: A statement of intent appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Popular Internet wisdom has it that you should never read the comments. And, for the most part, this is fairly sound advice. Because if you do read the comments, there is a significantly greater-than-zero percent chance that you will run into someone like "Steven Woolf" here, a thoroughly disagreeable individual who did me the questionable courtesy of leaving a particularly rancid comment on a five year old MoeGamer article earlier today:

I have never encountered this person before. Their email address was unfamiliar to me. The fact they showed up in the comments of an article from five years ago suggests to me that they stumbled across MoeGamer via random Googling. And the fact they took such umbrage at me using a naughty word to discourage "AI people" from feeling in any way welcome on my site suggests to me that they are, themselves, an "AI person" and thus, by extension, a cunt.

Comments like this are always sort of fascinating, because there was evidently some sort of thought process involved — and one that is alien to me. What was Steven Woolf doing reading a five year old article about a character from an obscure Japanese beat 'em up? The nature of his comment suggests that he wasn't there to celebrate his love of Japanese video games, otherwise he might have, you know, mentioned Japanese video games. Instead, he chose to absolutely, spectacularly lose his shit at a disclaimer halfway down my site's sidebar presented in a 12 pixel high font. Why is that? Could it be because he's a cunt? All signs point to "yes" thus far.

What's even better is that because MoeGamer (and likewise this site) has an "approval" process for new commenters, meaning that his furious, impotent raging at my discouraging of AI cunts from using my site as the basis for any of their lake-boiling bullshit will remain completely invisible to the rest of the world for all time, with the only record of it being a snarky post on Bluesky (which he doesn't appear to be on, and which will be deleted at the end of this week anyway) and this post here, which he will probably never see because it's on a different website and he's almost certainly too stupid to track it down for himself despite 90% of the URL being the same.

And even if he does find it, all he'll really encounter is the simple and indisputably correct assessment that he is, in fact, a cunt.

So well done, Steven Woolf. You gave me something to write about today. You have officially become content, and that's not a fate I would wish on anyone, except you, because you are a cunt.

I hope you're having a better day now you got your little tantrum out of the way. If not, I recommend you go and play some video games or something. I hear Denjin Makai is pretty good?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 451: Random encounters appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

If you breathe as many Internet fumes as I do on a daily basis, you are probably aware of the ongoing campaigns against Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe deciding that they are the arbiters of good taste, and causing big problems for anyone producing any sort of creative work that is even remotely sex-adjacent. I wrote a bit about the early days of what was going on here, but things have continued to escalate since I wrote that, and there are plenty of other people who can do a much better job than I can on reporting the ongoing saga.

An especially worrying development is that Patreon, long regarded as the "standard" for those who wish to financially support their favourite creatives on an ongoing basis, has started stepping up its intolerance of what it regards as "sexually gratifying media". This language is very deliberate, because it mirrors what payment processors have started to regard as "unacceptable" — despite the fact that, in their role as payment processors, it is absolutely not their place to judge what people are spending their money on.

Add this to the fact that Patreon recently sent around a rather worrying survey relating to generative AI, whose questions basically amounted to "can we pweeeeze steal all your precious content so we can train our AI?", and I am feeling increasingly glad that I have, over the last 17 years, stayed pretty much where I am in terms of my online presence. Sure, social media accounts have come and gone, but between this blog and MoeGamer, I'm feeling increasingly vindicated in keeping "my" parts of the Web mine.

There's a growing move towards (or should I say back towards) this in the form of the "indie Web movement". Honestly, the whole shtick there makes it sound a lot more complicated than it really is — much of the "official" IndieWeb site feels like it was written by Linux nerds… which I guess sort of tracks — because all you really need to carve out a piece of the Internet as your own is some means of hosting your own website, and some means of showcasing your… whatever it is you want to use as a means of expressing yourself.

There are some delightfully creative "indie Web" sites out there, with a lot of people seemingly getting right back into the depths of programming cool interactive things for people to explore, but honestly, the humble blog is all a lot of people need — and those are dead easy to set up, given the number of easily accessible, straightforward to use and often open-source options in that regard. I am, as I have been for the last 17 years, still using WordPress here, and while there are some things I very much do not like about the direction WordPress has taken in the last few years — particularly with regard to shoehorning in the obligatory "generate with AI" crap in several places — the software is still, on the whole, some of the best and most flexible in the business.

The difficulty, of course, is getting people to see your little corner of the Web without social media to promote it. Because it's harder than ever to get noticed on social media — and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) isn't much help, either. Not only because Google sucks now. Not only because a lot of search engines are pushing AI hard — and in the process discouraging people leaving the search site to go and visit individual websites. But also because heavily SEO'd text sucks to such a degree that it's almost as much of a waste of time as flat-out AI-generated text.

The answer, of course, is just to not really care. I don't. The value for me in writing on here and on MoeGamer is in having a place for me to just write. Sometimes people show up to read what I've written, and that's often (though not always) nice. But that's not why I do this. I'm not trying to be famous or some great authority on any subject. I am, as the header of this site says, just a nobody trying to make my way in an increasingly fucked-up world, and getting some thoughts out of my head onto the virtual page helps me to process things. A bit. I can say pretty much what I want here, within reason. And so I do.

I shan't pretend I don't still fall into pits of soul-sucking despair and depression, particularly when I'm feeling as burnt out as I do right now. But without this outlet, this safe place for myself, this little corner of the Internet that is my online home, more than any other social media profile page ever has been, I shudder to think what state I'd be in.

So yes. I am glad I have stuck with this place, and I will continue to stick with it for as long as it is practical to do so.

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The post #oneaday Day 438: Increasingly glad I kept this place appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As time advances ever-onwards towards my holiday and my (possibly permanent) break from social media, I find myself considering starting the whole thing early. Bluesky in particular has started showing worrying signs of the sort of passive-aggressive, performative annoyingness that plagued Twitter in the mid-2010s — this was, for me, what really set me on a path to disliking social media in general — and it's just not really fun any more.

There are aspects of Bluesky I do like. The "nuclear block", which prevents anyone seeing the specific posts you're replying to or quoting when you blocked the original poster, remains the platform's best feature, and is a good — albeit imperfect — solution to dogpiling. But dogpiling still goes on, because there are other ways of doing that.

But the passive aggressive thing, known in a past life as "subtweeting", where you post something obviously intended for the attention of a specific person, but one that you're not replying to explicitly, has seen a marked uptick recently. You know the sort of thing, posts that start "If you think [not-particularly contentious opinion, like thinking trans people should have rights], then just unfollow me now" or "When someone says [exceedingly obvious and hyper-specific red flag that clearly someone has mentioned in the last ten minutes], that tells you everything you need to know about that person" — posts that are intended to wind up a very specific person, but in a "not touching, can't get mad" sort of way; posts that encourage a "well, if you think this might be about you, you might be the problem" sort of attitude.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't confront hateful bigotry when it comes up. Particularly these days, when the significant progress we've made over the course of the last decade in terms of tolerance and acceptance with regard to race, gender and sexuality appears to be coming undone at a frighteningly rapid rate. But there are better ways to do it than posting passive-aggressive statements into the void. If you want to have an argument with someone, just go ahead and fucking have the argument. It might make you feel better for five minutes, until you realise how much time and energy you have wasted trying to change the mind of someone else on the Internet.

Or you could do something yourself that is more positive. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. Calling someone bouncing off the walls going "I HATE THE JEWS" a "Nazi" is not suddenly going to make them go "shit, I am? I am, aren't I? Thank you for setting me straight". Setting a good example yourself, meanwhile, up to and including getting involved in activism if you feel strongly enough about the issue in question, is a much more productive use of everyone's time. It won't stop the Nazis being Nazis, but if there's one thing several decades of Internet discourse should tell you at this point, it's that very little will.

One technique I've found extremely useful in training myself out of getting into annoying situations online is that if I see something which, for one reason or another, angers me, I will fully type out an indignant reply, look at it for a moment, take ten seconds to think "do I actually want to post this? Is the potential fallout from posting this worth it?" and then, more often than not, delete it, because the answer to both questions is inevitably "no". Just recently, this has been happening with such frequency that I find myself asking a follow-up question: "do I really still want to be part of this community, if situations like this keep arising?" And the answer there, too, is often turning out to be "no".

This is the thinking behind my great "unplug" in early September. I'm going to disconnect completely from all forms of "discourse" online for the duration of my holiday. I'm still going to keep my phone with me, of course, and I will do things like keep up to date on the news and suchlike with RSS, but social media and any sort of "open" chat (read: Discord) is off the table for me.

I'm just glad I've never got involved with TikTok. My overwhelming feeling from my thankfully limited exposure to TikTok is that TikTok is hell for this sort of performative crap, except now you have to see someone yelling things into their phone camera instead of posting indignant text messages. And TikTok never ends. God, what a fucking nightmare proposition.

I realise this entire post could itself be seen as performative and passive-aggressive. But, frankly, this is my own website, and I'm not pushing this out into the wider world in the hope some very specific person is going to see it. I'm just writing it for myself. And possibly my cat, who has been cuddling my leg for the entire time I've been writing this. I hope you enjoyed it, Patti.

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The post #oneaday Day 435: Performative tediousness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I count down to deactivating all social media aside from the little bit I need for work, I find myself tinkering with this site to make it a more comfortable "home" online. After all, once I ditch Bluesky, I will have no feed- or algorithm-based social media at all, with only YouTube (which is algorithm-based, yes, but I don't really count it as "social media"), Discord and various other private chat solutions (depending on friends' preferred methods) remaining.

Honestly, at this point, I'm relishing the prospect of some peace and quiet. Bluesky was fun for a while, but it just doesn't really feel worth the effort. Absolutely no other social media whatsoever holds any appeal for me, and I long for (LONG for) the day when I can ditch the work social media accounts also, because I absolutely detest working on them.

There are plenty of people out there who, I'm sure, have made social media work for them and even have an enjoyable time scrolling their feeds. I haven't felt the same sort of joy in silliness that I did in the early days of Twitter for many years at this point; after online interactions in general sort of imploded on themselves around the Gamergate years, things were never quite the same again afterwards. They'd been building that way for a while — for me, I think the Mass Effect 3 ending "controversy" was the beginning of the end, and that was, what, 2012? — and ever since then, what little social media I've kept up and running has been for one of two reasons: fear of losing touch with people that I have only ever interacted with on social media, and the feeling of "obligation" that I had to share my work, be it personal or professional in nature.

I still fear losing touch with some people, although honestly so many people have just fallen out of my life completely over the course of the last decade or so, what's a few more at this point for an incredibly lonely middle-aged man? The people who really matter to me, I already have alternative means of getting in touch with. I have a pinned post on my Bluesky page making my intentions clear, and so far no-one has made any particular attempt to get in touch via alternative means, and thus I have to conclude that either no-one cares, or it's going to be a situation where two months down the line, someone goes looking for me, finds my account deactivated and goes "I wonder what happened to that guy?"

I'm here. I'm still here. I've always been here. And as I let go of more and more of the toxic "services" that have been poisoning my mental health for the last decade and a half, I look forward to this place (and my other sites) being my true "home" online.

You are, of course, welcome to visit, dear reader. I'll be very happy to welcome you in.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 428: My home online appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'll write about this again nearer the time that I'm actually going to put this into practice, but I wanted to give some advance notice of what I'm planning.

On September 8, 2025, I'll be taking a big step back from social media for personal use. I'll be deactivating my Bluesky account, removing it and Discord from my phone, and leaving a bunch of Discord servers.

The reason for this is that social media in general — even the little bit I still hold onto for some inexplicable reason — continues to play havoc with my overall mental health, and honestly, there is really absolutely nothing left that makes me feel like I "need" it for anything other than occasional contact with other people. And there are other means of achieving that contact with other people.

This isn't intended to be a big dramatic "well I'm taking my ball and going home without you!" post, and it's nothing personal, particularly with regard to the Discord servers I will be disconnecting from. This is a me thing; it's about removing myself from situations that are continually self-destructive and unproductive — i.e. spending far too much time doomscrolling on Bluesky or just rotating around several Discord servers in case someone said anything vaguely interesting — and freeing up time and headspace for doing things that I want to do, that make me happy, and that are less inclined to have me staring into space of an evening.

Thus, as loathe as part of me is to isolate myself further from a world where I already feel somewhat abandoned by and/or alienated from most of my "real life" friends, I intend to take the following steps for the sake of my mental health and overall digital wellbeing:

• I will be deactivating my Bluesky account, at the very least temporarily while I am on holiday, and likely permanently.
• I will be leaving a significant number of Discord communities that I am currently part of. I emphasise, again, that there is nothing personal in this; I am just attempting to cut down on the "noise" and the self-destructive habits of continually scrolling around the same servers time after time, hour after hour. I will be keeping some small, "friendship group" servers, but that's it.
• I will be deleting Bluesky and Discord from my phone for the duration of my holiday, possibly permanently.
• I will be focusing the majority of my online presence on this blog, MoeGamer (my video game blog) and Scratch Pad (my creative writing site).
• I will only be contactable via email (you can use the Get In Touch page on this site if you don’t know my email address), Discord messages in the communities I remain active in (plus Discord DMs if we are friends on that platform), Google Chat if you know my email address, or WhatsApp private message if you know my phone number.

If you would like to stay in touch — and there are a bunch of you I would very much like it if you did! — then you can feel free to use any of the means outlined above to have a chat. It'd actually be quite nice to have some private conversations with many of you, away from the chaos of social media, so if we've had some good times in the past and I seem to have otherwise disappeared from the social channels you tend to use on the daily, please feel free to drop me a line.

Anyway, like I say, I wanted to give some advance notice of this, and I'll be posting something very similar on September 7, the day before I have a week's holiday as a last reminder. Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or whatever about the above, well, you know where to find me!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 421: Ch-ch-ch-changes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Not for the first time, I find myself reassured by an article from Aftermath, this time on the subject of falling asleep to Let's Plays, which is something my wife and I do on the daily. Nightly. Whatever.

Anyway, I knew that falling asleep to some sort of "noise" was becoming increasingly widespread for various reasons — not least of which being the huge ball of anxiety pretty much all of us appear to be carrying around inside our respective heads at all times these days — but I wasn't sure how common specifically using Let's Plays was. I especially wasn't sure about the use of Game Grumps, one of our shows of choice.

But, according to the article, it seems that it's not only common (right down to using Game Grumps!) but that there might actually be a certain amount of value to it. And that's an actual neurologist saying that.

I never used to "need" noise to get to sleep, and I'm not sure I really do now. But my wife Andie finds it difficult to deal with complete silence, particularly in the dead of night, and so we've both fallen into the habit of having something playing when we are ready to go to sleep. Most of the time, it is either the aforementioned Game Grumps — or my own videos, which, as it turns out, are pleasantly relaxing to listen to.

In fact, I'll be honest here — and I'm aware that this may well make me sound much more narcissistic than I actually am — I find my own videos to be the absolute best thing to help me get to sleep. I think it's because I'm already so familiar with all of them — both from having made them, and from having listened to each of them many times each at this point — that they strike a good balance between making enough noise to distract me from Thinking Bad Thoughts, and from not engaging me enough to want to pay attention to them. The trouble I occasionally have with Game Grumps is that I enjoy listening to them so much — particularly if it's a series I haven't watched or listened to before — that I end up paying attention to them rather than concentrating on getting to sleep.

I don't know if I'm a textbook "insomniac" as such, but I've always found it difficult to get to sleep. I get stuck in a sort of loop where I lie down and close my eyes, then my brain suddenly pipes up and goes "you don't actually know how to make yourself go to sleep, do you?" I then spend ages thinking "I really want to go to sleep, I wish I could go to sleep right now", but the act of thinking those things means that my brain is not shutting down and actually going to sleep. This can go on for hours at a time, particularly if the room is silent.

And that's where the Let's Plays help. If there's some noise on, my brain can latch onto that, and it doesn't get caught in that self-destructive cycle. It has to be the right kind of noise, though; I've found that music doesn't tend to work, and neither does simple, straightforward white noise (and/or its variously "coloured" relatives). But talking does, particularly if it's about something I find relaxing, familiar and comforting.

And so that's how we typically fall asleep: either to Danny from Game Grumps playing King's Quest IV or Space Quest for the umpteenth time… or to me playing old Atari games (including, on occasion, King's Quest and Space Quest games).

I'm reassured to learn that this isn't "a weird thing that we do"; it's a thing that seemingly is quite widespread.

Now, I just need to decide what's on the playlist for tonight…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 403: Falling asleep to Let's Plays appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

After closing my original account a few years back — I'd never used it, I'd never got a job using it and I didn't see the value in it — I opened a new LinkedIn account a few weeks back. I still absolutely hate it.

Not only is its interface second only to Facebook in terms of general clutter, user unfriendliness and AI being rammed in your face everywhere, but the general tone of everyone on there is just insufferable. Every post is some great life lesson that they've learned from their time in business to business sales; every little happening at work is cause for twelve paragraphs of pontificating; every opportunity to brag about how you absolutely are not a "low performer" or similar is taken, and festooned with emoji.

I cannot imagine ever thinking at any point "I know, I think I'll check LinkedIn, that sounds like a fun use of my time". The fact the thing constantly emails me to let me know I have "1 new message" when all it is is some spam ad in my message inbox pisses me off. The fact it emails me to tell me I have "new notifications" when it's people I don't know starting jobs at companies I've never heard of pisses me off.

In short, I don't really know why I opened an account there again. I guess I was just curious to see if it was in any way "useful" for "networking", as some people like to say. And perhaps it is useful for that, if you're the insufferable business-speak type. But that is emphatically not me. I struggle to take posts even from people I know seriously, and I fear that if I spent any protracted amount of time on the platform, I would almost certainly tell at least one person (no-one specific) to stop being so up their own arse, and if they really think they have something worthwhile to say about "the world of work", as our careers advisors at school used to call it, perhaps they should try writing a self-help book that management consultants can put on their shelves and never read rather than inflicting their bilge on the broader Internet community.

I can't do it. I struggle with social media at the best of times these days, but the fact it's pretty much the only way to get in touch with some people really rankles me. I miss the good old days of email chains where people put time and effort into the messages they sent one another; late-night chats on MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger; hell, even text messages felt more personal than what we have today.

It's one of the many ways I feel completely and utterly left behind by the world as it exists today, and I absolutely hate it. So don't expect to see any activity from me on LinkedIn any time soon. I can think of very few worse ways to spend my time.

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The post #oneaday Day 400: I can't do LinkedIn appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I have spoken many times on this blog about how I find needless negativity to be exhausting, unproductive and not conducive to good conversation, but on a regular basis, I am made to feel like I have something of a minority opinion on this subject. People are much more willing to hate on things than they are to say nice things about something.

Case in point: this week one of those interminable "quote tweet (but on Bluesky)" memes did the rounds, this time encouraging people to go through Wikipedia's list of "Video games considered the best" and hate on games of their choice. Naturally, given an opportunity to spew vitriol at things a fair few people like, everyone jumped at the opportunity:

The whole post is, of course, fairly transparent engagement bait, and people fall for this sort of thing every time. But, like I say, they're significantly more likely to fall for it if the opportunity to be negative presents itself. This post got 1.8K quote posts, with people jumping at the chance to complain about titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, Overwatch, Fortnite, Mass Effect and even fucking Pong.

I… don't understand it. I've always been of the opinion that if you're engaged with and love a hobby, then you seek out and enjoy the things about that hobby which appeal to you. Expending energy on things that you, personally, do not like — and make no mistake, pretty much every one of those quote posts is not "this is bad and here are some solid reasons why" but rather "I don't like this" — just seems like a massive waste of time and energy.

You not liking Thing does not mean that Thing is bad. It just means that, for whatever reason, it didn't click with you. And that's fine! I just don't need to hear about it, and I don't need to see you smugly thinking Your Opinion Is Correct because ooh, so brave, you think Fortnite is "bad". I don't like Fortnite, either. And that's why you've never seen me write about it. I know I won't enjoy it, I know there are many things I don't like about it — so I just don't engage with it! It's really not hard.

I'm not mad with people who do enjoy Fortnite and I don't feel the need to try and convince people that my dislike of Fortnite is "the correct opinion". I simply don't care. I have a bajillion other games to enjoy that I do like, and I'd much rather 1) play them and 2) talk about them with others. I could go off on a 20-post thread about why I don't like Fortnite, but what is that achieving? Not very much, really. To me, someone going "I hate Thing" is just a means of shutting down a conversation, whereas someone telling me how much they like Thing and why can be the start of something wonderful.

Word of mouth works! So I'd much rather it be used for something positive — I can take some sort of action with that, like buying the game you're recommending — rather than negativity.

I realise that this post is, in itself, being negative, though, so I'll just tell you that you should go and play Raiden Nova because it's a lot of fun, and leave it at that. Good night to you!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 385: Hater Checkpoint appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've had a few right weirdoes in the comments section of MoeGamer of late, and they are a prime example of why I adopt a fairly strict moderation policy: anyone who hasn't commented before has to have their first comment approved before any of their comments will appear on the site. If I don't approve that initial comment, the words they hammered into their crusty keyboard will not appear on the site.

I think by far the strangest so far was the one who started off talking about nostalgia, but then started banging on about the "globalist agenda" and how modern video games were all basically in service to this. By "globalist agenda", by the way, this person absolutely meant "the Jews", and as such their comment didn't get anywhere even a little bit close to being published on my site. I did mock it a bit on social media, though.

Today I had a guy who got really uppity about me writing about the Game Boy game The Sword of Hope and thinking that it was actually quite worthwhile and interesting. He absolutely could not fathom the idea of someone from well after a creative work had been published not judging it by the standards of its time. He also almost immediately started banging on about "censorship" due to the combination of my anti-spam filter and my aforementioned comments policy, so he did not get let through either.

I have a fairly flawless sense these days of when someone is going to be a pain in the arse in the comments. There's just a certain way that some people come across in text that lets you know they're a dickhead and probably a racist, and thus I have absolutely no hesitation in banishing them to the shadow realm when they happen to stagger into my comments section.

I do the same on YouTube; for all its faults, YouTube has one of the absolute best moderation tools in existence, which is the "Hide User From Channel" option. For the unfamiliar, what this does is effectively "shadowbanning" the commenter from your channel, so their comments don't appear under your videos and you don't get notifications about them… but to their eyes, they're still able to comment as normal. There's a perverse satisfaction in doing this, because you know some of these absolute cretins will be typing out long, obnoxious diatribes about whatever has offended their delicate sensibilities this week, and no-one will ever see them. Again, I have zero hesitation in doing this; if someone bursts into the comments section and the first thing they do is act like a twat, they're going straight in the sin bin.

Life is too short to deal with dickheads on the Internet. Of course, we'd all rather they didn't exist at all, but at least there are plenty of tools with which we can frustrate and repel them. Make good use of them; it's worth the effort.

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The post #oneaday Day 359: Commenter policy appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am once again inspired to write something by a piece over on Aftermath, this time on the subject of short-form videos such as Instagram/Facebook Reels and TikTok. The thrust of the piece is that the author decided to completely give up looking at this type of video online for the 40 days of Lent, and has felt considerably better as a result.

I am not surprised. I have noted on numerous other occasions how much I detest the push for short-form vertical-format "content" happening all over the Internet, and how frustrating I find it when I see people mindlessly scrolling through video after video without really taking anything in, just scrolling, over and over, for hour after hour.

I have never been sucked into this corner of the Internet. I've done the social media quasi-addiction thing, and it's not nice. I recognised short-form video as being kind of bullshit when it first started to be a thing — I still remember the now-deleted Glove and Boots video about how shooting vertical video makes you a terrible person — and I feel vindicated any time I see a piece like Riley's article on Aftermath concluding that yes, short-form video is a big pile of shit. I'm firmly of the belief that the format has done potentially irreversible harm to people's mental wellbeing in general, and specifically their attention span.

Do you know what the most depressing statistic on YouTube is? I've probably asked this before, but it's my blog, so I will ask the same rhetorical questions again if I feel like it. Anyway, the most depressing statistic on YouTube is the watch time or "retention" factor for your videos. This tracks how long people actually watch your videos for — in other words, if they sit down, click "Play" and watch the whole thing, or if they just tap onto it on their phone, watch ten seconds and then click on the next thing that catches their attention, without taking anything in whatsoever.

The stat makes for grim reading on longer videos, as you might expect, but I find it especially frustrating and upsetting when I see it being in the toilet on videos that are a couple of minutes long at most, like a trailer or something. And I suspect the "pivot" to short-form video on multiple social media platforms has played a significant role in this situation, because none of the platforms that host short-form video encourage their users to show any sort of respect for the creators of those videos. All they want you to do is keep scrolling through the never-ending feed, helping them build their algorithmic picture of Who You Really Are, all so they can better advertise to you.

This isn't to say the short-form video creators are entirely blameless in this, either. I never "got" Vine when it was a thing, either, and every time I'm inadvertently subjected to a short-form vertical video with sped-up footage of someone ranting and raving about something to the camera, I find myself never wanting to see anything from that creator ever again.

This might be a "me" thing, it might be an "autistic" thing, but I find so much short-form video to be incredibly aggressive and confrontational. Whether it's someone bellowing at the top of their lungs about the terrible customer service experience they had in B&Q last Wednesday or someone giving an impassioned plea to support a cause that actually matters, all I feel when I see a thumbnail or a video of someone's face right up against their phone camera is the same sort of discomfort I would feel if that person was invading my personal space, getting right in my face and shouting so close I could smell their breath.

I genuinely do not understand. I do not see the appeal. I do not find the supposed "jokes" funny. I do not find the "skits" funny. And anyone who thinks TikTok is a good place to go to get recipes or DIY guides is fucking delusional. How, in any way, is a looping video in any way an optimal means of learning how to cook something or build something? We've had these things sorted for years at this point.

And don't get me started on all the YouTube videos who make their entire content strategy "I saw this thing on TikTok and now I'm going to do something with it". Testing "viral" TikTok recipes. Trying "viral" TikTok AliExpress plastic landfill. Attempting to perform a "viral" TikTok dance. At least by not being on TikTok I can avoid all this shit at the source, but when it starts spilling over into other forms of media that I do still engage with, like YouTube, it's very annoying.

I am glad I never stuck my head into TikTok and found anything even the slightest bit worthwhile. On my one foray into the service just to see what the retro gaming scene looked like on there, I found an American guy gurning at the camera and explaining that "back in the day we had to plug our consoles into the TV and the wall!", immediately closed the app and deleted it. There was nothing there for me. I am better than that. You are better than that. And, as with everyfuckingthing else in the world at this point, the AI garbage that is starting to fill these platforms is just making them even worse than they already are.

"Oh, it's harmless," people say. "It's just a bit of fun. I like to watch the girls dancing. Sometimes there are really good recipes on there."

No. Stop it. You do not need that shit in your life. All of those things you just described can be accessed via other means that aren't destroying your attention span and your ability to focus on anything for more than 20 seconds at a time. And there are even ways to do all of them that don't involve feeding advertising algorithms.

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The post #oneaday Day 315: Short-form shite appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's been interesting to see the public response to Blue Prince since it came out yesterday. A bunch of folks on Steam, the absolute worst place to talk about video games, seem oddly resistant to the idea that it might actually be quite good.

(For the record, I'll note that for now, after about 6 hours of play, I'm definitely enjoying Blue Prince, but I'm not yet convinced of all the "Game of the Year!" accolades it's already getting. I am open to it convincing me, however.)

Earlier, I saw someone praising a negative review by saying "finally, an honest review", and others noting that the "positive reviews are suspicious", despite the vast majority of them being articulate and knowledgeable about the game and its appeal elements. In the Discussions tab, which is where hope really goes to die, there are some folks getting legitimately angry that some people are enjoying the game more than they do.

I'm not entirely sure why this is occurring, either. Blue Prince is not, to my knowledge, a particularly — and you'll pardon me for using this obnoxious word — "woke" game in that it doesn't force Gamers to acknowledge the existence of black, female, homosexual or transgender people. (If it does later, it certainly doesn't within its first 6 hours of play. This is not a criticism — more a side-effect of the way the game is designed and structured, since you are alone while you play, and the other characters appear in photographs, notes, journal entries and suchlike.)

I mention this because the attitude I'm seeing from some people is normally reserved for the "anti-woke" crowd when they want to tear a game down for challenging their narrow-minded perceptions of the world. But… there's seemingly nothing like that in here, which makes the sheer passion with which some people seem to hate this game on principle all the more confusing.

Now I will admit that Blue Prince is probably not a game for everyone. It is slow-paced, thoughtful and contemplative. There's nothing that one would call "action". It requires that you learn its rules through play rather than having your hand held through tutorials. And it is a game where, despite there being no real "skill" involved from a hand-eye co-ordination perspective, you will still fail a lot before you roll credits on it — and where you will doubtless fail even more after those credits have rolled and there is more to discover.

I get that. When I encounter a game like that, my response is to go "Eh, okay, I see why some people like that but it's not for me." Then I turn it off, uninstall it, whatever, and I don't play it again. I might return to it when some time has passed — there are several games I've come to appreciate many years after I bounced off them when I first encountered them — but, in most cases, I won't be mad at the game. I think the maddest I've got at a game was with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, because I found the single-player campaign in that singularly insulting to my intelligence, but even then I just… did what I outlined above. I uninstalled it, then I didn't play it again. Job done.

The funny thing about the people getting absolutely frothing mad about Blue Prince right now is that in most cases, they are revealing themselves to have not understood what the game is doing. Blue Prince is deliberately obtuse in some ways, yes, but I am particularly stupid when it comes to things like this and I got the general vibe of what's expected of me pretty quickly. The people getting most upset by it are the ones who seemingly want a simple, straight line to the finish, to max out all the achievements and say they're "done" with it. Rather delightfully, Blue Prince is not at all forthcoming with achievements and trophies; it eschews the usual "started the game!" and "got a Game Over!" achievements in favour of a small collection of awards that demonstrate you've made meaningful progress. The fact that this is probably making some people mad is quite enjoyable.

Also whiny little babies pissing and moaning about "no ultrawide support" can get in the bin. Buy a normal person monitor, or play the game in 16:9. No-one gives a shit about your "no ultrawide, no buy" policy.

Anyway, Blue Prince has been a good time thus far. Like I say, so far I remain unconvinced of its "Game of the Year" status, but I'm willing to keep plugging away at it to see what I can discover, because there's enough here that I do like. And if I end up tiring of it? I won't be mad, and I won't feel like I've wasted my time. It's nice to be part of the current conversation for once and to experience something that has clearly resonated with a lot of people for one reason or another.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 308: The apparent need to hate appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I watched a good video earlier, and I recommend you do too if you have a spare 46 minutes and 4 seconds. It's by a chap called Eddy Burback, who makes videos that are just… about stuff. He always puts in a decent amount of research to the topics he talks about, he makes his discussions both interesting and personally relevant, and he's genuinely entertaining. If you've never watched his stuff before, this video is a great place to get to know him.

For those too lazy or disinclined to click that video and actually watch it, his aim was to go 30 days with his smartphone locked up in a safe so he couldn't use it at all. He wasn't denying himself access to the Internet, social media or anything like that, and he set up an old Mac laptop in the corner of his living room to access iMessage if he needed it, but only allowed himself a cumulative total of 5 minutes across the entire month to check it. He found, among other things, that after checking it once, he decided he didn't really need to check it at all.

The other things he did were deliberate, conscious steps "backwards". He set up a landline with an on-device answering machine. He made plans with friends over the phone, and then just showed up at the place he said he'd be at the time he said he'd be there, rather than constantly checking in via text or chat. He navigated by looking things up on the computer at home, then either writing things down in a notepad or just remembering them. He bought a physical pre-payment card to ride the bus rather than using an app. He handled electronic "tickets" for events and facilities such as the cinema by printing out a hardcopy.

And he seemed happy. I'm sure part of this was to aid with the storytelling — you tend to go into a project like this with a hypothesis that you kind of want to prove — but I don't doubt that spending a month without habitually, obsessively checking one's phone is a healthy thing to do. And as time goes on, I increasingly find myself wanting to do just that.

There are, as Burback talks about in the video, drawbacks. If you're not someone who likes talking on the phone, a landline isn't going to do you much good — and likewise if your friends tend to interact with you primarily via text message or chat applications. On top of that, landlines attract spam calls even more than mobiles do. This means you can very easily find yourself feeling even more isolated than you were already, which is probably counter-productive to the intent of the experiment: the aim is to get off your phone so that you can enjoy living your life a little more, and part of that is spending time with friends. If you can't get in touch with those friends via any means other than a text or chat message, that's a problem.

Most other things, there are ways round, though. For navigation, you can still print out maps and directions from sites like Google Maps and Mapquest (which, yes, still exists!). For convenient payments, most places accept contactless cards now, particularly since the pandemic almost outlawed cash altogether. For public transport, pre-paid cards exist, even if you have to go digging to a retailer who actually remembers where they keep them after not selling one for a decade or more. And for making arrangements with friends? Well, if they're good friends, they'll respect your lifestyle decision and be willing to interact with you and make plans via whatever means you are allowing, such as the phone; the fact that people were perfectly fine with adapting to his situation is one of the things Burback seemed most surprised about.

One thing Burback found was that without the constant connectivity a phone in your pocket brings, he was much less likely to cancel plans on a moment's notice or suddenly decide he wasn't in the mood for something. Instead, if he'd made plans, he'd made a commitment to another person, and not showing up for that commitment would be letting them down. Of course, sometimes these things are unavoidable — but that's why you still have means of communicating like the landline or email. It's not like locking your smartphone away completely cuts you off from society altogether. It just means that you are reachable on your own terms.

And I think that's the important thing. It allows you to really take control of your own life. It means you are not beholden to social media algorithms and the arbitrary schedules of whether or not "interesting" people are online posting mindless content that doesn't really enrich your life in any way. It means you're more likely to pick up a book and read it all the way through, instead of scrolling through 50 TikTok videos, not taking anything in from any of them.

Completely getting rid of your phone is obviously a drastic option. But the conclusion Burback came to was that while there are undoubted conveniences — and pleasures — to having a smartphone accessible at all times, having a month completely disconnected from it allowed him to develop a more healthy relationship with it. He was less inclined to doomscroll through social media, less inclined to experience the world through a camera app rather than his own eyes, and more inclined to having fewer but more meaningful interactions with the people who are important to him. And that, in turn, left a lot more time for doing things that he found enjoyable and pleasurable: watching movies, reading books, all that sort of thing.

I won't lie: that sounds nice. I have already cut back on using my phone a lot compared to what I used to do with it, but there are still times when I really resent its presence. Perhaps I should try a similar experiment sometime.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 298: Can you give up your phone? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Former England manager and renowned penalty whiffer Sir Gareth Southgate recently delivered the prestigious Richard Dimbleby lecture, as reported by The Guardian (and doubtless some other places, but The Guardian is where I saw it).

The thrust of Southgate's speech was the plight of young men, and how they are, I quote, "feeling isolated, grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society".

I agree with this part, though I'd probably broaden it to "most men" rather than just "young men". We are encountering a problem I could have predicted a decade ago: that strides forward in progressive attitudes are leaving some men feeling somewhat cast adrift.

This isn't to say that the broad shifts in progressive attitudes are in any way wrong, I hasten to add, whatever the current United States administration might be attempting to do right now. No, on the contrary, it's good that, on the whole, we have much less sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia than we used to have. We haven't eliminated any of these problems, unfortunately, but progress has been made.

As part of all that happening, though, there was a certain amount of demonisation of privileged groups in society. Not universally, by any means, and again, I'm not saying that white men deserve to be "better" than anyone else. But for a good decade or more, men have been facing something of an existential crisis as society attempted to "make up" for their historical position of privilege. And this, in turn, has led to things like the loneliness epidemic among young men, the alt-right pipeline and all that business. That's a thing that has happened. The question is why.

Southgate argued that these men "spend more time online searching for direction and are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography". This quote, unsurprisingly, is the one that has been largely taken out of context and objected to. And I don't disagree with the people who did that. While gambling is hard to defend, I firmly believe there's a place in society for both gaming and pornography, and that neither of them are inherently evil things. The problem, as with so many things, is the groups that spring up around those things.

Which, as it happens, is what Southgate's speech went on to criticise.

"This void is filled by a new kind of role model who do not have their best interests at heart," he said. "These are callous, manipulative and toxic influencers, whose sole drive is for their own gain. They willingly trick young men into believing success is measured by money or dominance, never showing emotion, and that the world — including women — is against them. They are as far away as you could possibly get from the role models our young men need in their lives."

The key nuance that Southgate is missing here is that while some "influencers" (ugh, I hate that word, but I'll use it for the sake of quotations in this instance) in the gaming, gambling and pornography spaces are having a harmful effect on young men's wellbeing, this is not a universal thing by any means. (Again, I'd make the argument that gambling is the hardest to defend here, but even that's by no means a universal negative — look at things like The National Lottery and the charitable organisations attached to them.) I hate to be all "not all [x]", because people seem to take that as you having lost an argument, but it really is the case in this instance.

What he's getting at is exactly what I described above (and back in this post) — disenfranchised young men are finding what they believe to be "role models" in figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, who are saying the things they want to hear, and reinforcing harmful attitudes. And these figures "recruit" from fields that young men are interested in — like gaming, gambling and pornography.

The nuance is that gaming, gambling and pornography aren't themselves to blame for the existence of Tate, Peterson and others like them, but rather they just happen to be where figures like that found their most fertile markets. Being into gaming, gambling or pornography doesn't mean you're immediately going to get sucked down the alt-right pipeline into a life of perpetual fury at the world — but I can see how that happens, as I've described elsewhere.

I think it's important to highlight the positives of these things. Gaming, in particular, is probably the fastest growing creative medium in the world, and is a truly democratised form of art. Anyone from a solo independent developer to a huge multinational corporation can make a game, and the market will support that. Granted, it's harder for a solo independent developer to make as much of a splash as a huge multinational corporation with an army of marketing specialists, but it's not impossible — look at stuff like Vampire Survivors and even Minecraft's origins.

Gambling, as I say, is harder to defend, but not impossible. While a gambling addiction can be utterly devastating to individuals and families alike, I don't see the harm in an occasional flutter on the National Lottery, particularly when the money is going to Good Causes. Sports betting, I'm not even going to try and defend. But you hopefully see my point.

And pornography. While there has always been exploitation and suffering surrounding the production of pornography, today we have a society where sex workers aren't treated as something shameful to be swept under the rug, but where they have meaningful contributions to online discourse, and where the most prolific, uh, performers can make a surprising amount of money, often for just posting videos online. We have artists who focus on drawing pornography as a means of self-expression, or to cater to the tastes of their audience. And that audience gets to explore their fantasies and learn about their tastes in a safe environment.

All of these fields have their negative, toxic ends. "Gamer" discourse surrounding the recently released Assassin's Creed Shadows, for example, shows that we still have a lot of work to do with regard to racism. I don't know anything about the gambling influencer sphere, but it doesn't seem like… something I want to get involved with. And, of course, pornography still has the exploitation element, even in seemingly democratised scenarios such as OnlyFans.

But then… doesn't anything have its toxic element? Southgate's own field of football has its own problems with racism, homophobia, xenophobia, hooliganism and violence, but I don't see him acknowledging that. It feels just a little disingenuous to specifically pick out the things he did in his speech; it's approaching "moral panic" territory, and while there are things we can work on with regard to all of those fields, I don't think it's justified to make blanket statements like "gaming is an unhealthy alternative to having a father figure".

Toxic influencers are a different issue to the games industry in general. The games industry has its own problems that it still needs to grapple with, but it is not a direct, straight line from gaming to Andrew Tate. Southgate argues that "success is about much more than the final score; it isn't a straight line, and it's not a single moment". The same is true for negative cycles, too; you can't point to one single thing and go "that is the cause of all my woes".

For my part, I believe the increasingly abusive practices of algorithm-driven social media are more harmful than anything else when it comes to the situation men find themselves in these days. Because social media is how those harmful messages get out and how they are spread — often with the full approval of the platform holders, because they know the most toxic waste of the Internet is that which gets the most "engagement". But social media is just part of a much more complicated picture, and one we could do well with trying to zoom out and see the entirety of.

Men are suffering. Men are feeling isolated. Men are grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society. Gaming and pornography, like anything else, within reason, can be a comfort for those men when engaged with in moderation. They are not the enemy. It is, however, correct to say that toxic "influencers" are a real problem, so that is what we should perhaps be looking at more closely.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 285: On that thing what Gareth Southgate said appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Time moves on, and things change. I didn't really notice the gradual disintegration of the "blogosphere" because it was just that — gradual. But with social media taking its place as many folks' primary means of self-expression online, it's hard to deny that, now, the age of the personal blog would, at first glance, appear to be over.

I look at my WordPress reader and it's a bit sad; folks that I used to enjoy reading the posts of on a near-daily basis haven't updated for a year or more, and since their blog was the primary means through which I kept up with them, I don't know what they're up to now, or even if they're okay.

Sure, there are a few still happily going about their business — particular shoutouts to Infernal Monkey's thoroughly NSFW but hilarious wanking blog, Kresnik258gaming's retro Sony games site and Ernst Krogtoft's excellent in-depth explorations of retro gaming for just a few sites I've been following for years that are still actively updating at least semi-regularly — but my Reader is no longer the active community hub that it once was.

I miss seeing folks like Irina of I Drink and Watch Anime, Leth of Lethargic Ramblings (which appears to no longer be online) and the whole #oneaday crew; various others that I once knew by name and considered friends, but who, in many cases, appear to have vanished into the ether. That's their choice, of course, and I don't blame them for wanting to just quietly retreat with the way the Internet is these days, but I still miss them.

Going along with that is the fact that people just don't seem to be reading blogs any more. This place used to get a few hundred views a day, which is obviously peanuts in the grand scheme of the Internet, but it always felt like a noteworthy number of people who were interested in the daily life of a relative nobody like me, particularly when I was never making a particular effort to SEO optimise this place or write about trending topics.

D'you wanna know how many page views I had yesterday? Five. This isn't really a complaint, because the only reason I'm writing here is more as a journalling exercise than anything else, and that's how it's always been — but those figures are a stark contrast from when I started daily posts first time around here, when #oneaday was a community effort.

And the more I think about this, the more I wonder why this has happened. Sure, social media is good for a quick dopamine hit if a post does numbers, but you are, by design, limited in what you can say — and the sites that are still the biggest in the world despite both having gone down the right-wing toilet are both algorithmically driven to an abusive degree, making it near-impossible to actually see something you might be interested in rather than something which is "suggested".

Blogs, meanwhile, are completely freeform. There's no algorithm at play. You follow a person's blog, you get that person's blog. When they update that blog, you get that post. When you want to respond to what they said, you can comment right on that post, assuming they've left comments turned on. Over time, you can really get to know the person who owns that blog, even if, in the case of larger sites, you never become "friends" with them as such.

But even then, there's a personal touch that social media simply doesn't match. I remember years back I wrote a post about how inspirational I found Allie Brosh's hilarious (and, at the time, enormously popular) Hyperbole and a Half blog, and the lady herself came and commented on my blog to say thank you.

That was amazing to me at the time, but nowadays, I suspect that sadly, relatively few people know who Allie Brosh is; her one lasting legacy on the Internet is the "[x] all the things!" meme, which began its life in an innocuous post from 2010 about how hard it was to be a functional adult with depression and ADHD, but which I suspect is not known by a lot of people using the funny cartoon of the gremlin with the broom to make some sort of "hilarious" point online.

One strange development I've witnessed recently is that blogs have sort of come back, except folks don't call them "blogs" any more. They call them "newsletters", based on the assumption that most folks will subscribe to them via email. And while there are some excellent examples of those — my favourite is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is a sole voice of sanity in a tech world that seems to be going increasingly insane — I kind of don't like the name change. "Newsletter" implies something of some importance; something that you follow in order to keep up with important things. And as such, it feels kind of silly to sign up for a "newsletter" from some random person online that you don't know. Newsletters are things you get from the local church, or that one place you bought PC parts from that one time, or a software company you like. They're something that organisations send out, not people.

And I think it's important to make that distinction. Because if you're positioning your work as a "newsletter", you're automatically placing a certain amount of pressure on yourself to make everything you write "newsworthy". Your newsletter needs to be about something, and you need to stick to that subject, lest you lose those all important subscribers and Number No Longer Go Up.

A blog, meanwhile, is just a public diary. Sure, it can be more than that, and yes, of course you can specialise its topic — that's what I've done with my other site MoeGamer — but at its heart, it's a public diary: you write something, you date-stamp it, you post it out into the void. That thing you write doesn't have to be important, it doesn't have to be thought-provoking, it doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be anything. But the one thing it will always be is personal. Anyone reading it is getting a glimpse into your mind, your personality, your soul.

Newsletters are not replacements for blogs. Social media is not a replacement for blogs. And fucking Discord absolutely is definitely not a replacement for blogs.

I miss your blogs. And you're missing out by not reading more blogs. So if you have a blog — or indeed if you are, for some inexplicable reason, inspired to start one after everything I've written above — please let me know. I'll happily add it to my subscriptions. Because heaven knows social media hasn't been fun for a long time, and while Bluesky is definitely an improvement over Twitter for the most part, it still lacks the magic that blogs once had.

So c'mon, let's hear it. Let's build up a kickass blogroll and party like it's 15 years ago.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 274: You should have a blog. And you should read more blogs. And you should share your blogs with me appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Likely to be a long one today, and I'm not entirely sure exactly what I want to say, nor exactly how to say it, but I ask you to indulge me, whether you're a regular reader, someone who stumbled across this page, or someone I specifically pointed in the direction of this post.

I'm just going to start typing and see where things go from there.

This is something I've been meaning to write for some time, but have never really known exactly how to write it. It's probably going to be difficult to write, it's probably going to be difficult contemplating the possible reactions to it, and I honestly don't know if it's a good idea to even write it at all in the first place. But having had… Feelings festering inside me for probably the best part of a decade and some change at this point, I think it's time I got at least some of them down on paper.

I was inspired to write this by Chris "Papapishu" Person's excellent post over on Aftermath, I'm Only Here Because I Was A Forum Poster, in which he contemplates how, in the mid 2000s, he found a community of like-minded folks on the forums for 1up.com, and that, via a somewhat roundabout route, resulted in him being a professional games journalist, initially for Kotaku and subsequently for Aftermath.

Pishu isn't the only person for whom this is true. I can probably attribute my current position indirectly to those days back on the 1up.com forums, and Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti of Giant Bomb, both specifically namechecked in Pishu's piece, almost certainly have their own similar stories. Those heady pre-social media days on 1up.com were, it's fair to say, a real high point for online socialisation for me and for many others, and I feel like things have only gotten worse since the collapse of that site and its consequences: the community scattering to the four winds, never really settling down and calling one place "home" ever again.

I first came to 1up.com because of the family connection. My brother, John Davison, helped to launch the site, and was also working on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine at the time. 1up.com was a bold new experiment in online video game-related media: its social features were, at the time, pretty revolutionary, allowing any of its users to start a blog, create a club with its own private message board, and post on the forums. The site still had professional staff, of course, and for many folks the various 1up.com podcasts by that staff were a real highlight of the site. But for me, the thing that made me happier more than anything was the sense of community it had at its peak.

As someone who is what I now understand to be autistic, finding a community of like-minded nerds online was an absolute lifeline. Finally, I had a place where I could well and truly be myself, among "my people". And it didn't take long for me to find a niche within a niche: nerds who enjoyed video games, and who enjoyed talking about them at great length, in great detail, and with a mind to proper in-depth critical analysis rather than just flame wars or quickly writing things off because they didn't score over 80% in a review.

If you look back over the past entries of this blog, you'll see frequent references to "The Squadron of Shame". This was a loose conglomerate of 1up.com members who came together after a discussion on the 1up Yours podcast about "The Pile of Shame": what today tends to be referred to as "the backlog". The pile of games that you've bought, but haven't gotten around to. The games you always meant to play, but haven't. The games that don't get the time of day in reviews, but which you always thought looked interesting.

Fun fact: the first video I ever posted on YouTube was a hacked-together "trailer" for the games we'd covered up until that point.

1up Yours was initially intending to pick a game from the hosts' respective Piles of Shame, play it as a group, then discuss it the following episode, book club style. They didn't really manage to do that — and this isn't a criticism or admonishment of them, as they were all busy people — but a group of us on the forums thought that it was a really good idea… so we did it instead, beginning with the game the 1up Yours crew intended to cover: Psychonauts.

Squad "Missions", as they were known, took the form of a forum thread, in which the person proposing the "mission" would outline the reasons they thought the game in question was noteworthy and why they thought it could do with some in-depth discussion. These initial posts were often long and in-depth in their own right, and they set a good tone for the subsequent discussion: Squad threads became notorious as being wordy, but no-one gave us grief for it, and we often got a shout-out on 1up Yours for successfully picking up and running with the otherwise aborted concept.

One day, something terrible happened on those forums, and I'm not entirely sure why. Where there once had been a selection of subforums specific to particular types of discussion — including individual platforms, plus a special forum for the "1up Radio" podcasts, which is where the Squad threads resided — there were now just two forums: "Games" and "Not Games". Presumably this was done in an attempt to make moderation easier, but it was the beginning of the end for 1up.com's community.

The first Squad thread we posted under this new layout (in "Games") was immediately trolled by someone, clearly unfamiliar with how we had done things on the 1up Radio boards, complaining about a "massive fucking wall of text", and things derailed quickly from there. It was abundantly clear, both from this forum upheaval and various other behind-the-scenes happenings at 1up.com, that the writing was on the wall for this community, and so we started looking into alternative approaches. (1up.com actually hobbled along until 2013, but most of the community and staff left long before that.)

Many of us settled on the fledgling Twitter as a means of interacting with one another, but one of the most important things we did was organise a podcast. This would take the place of our megathreads on the 1up.com boards, and allow a rotating group of us — with several regulars — to discuss the games in-depth, in person, for as long as we wanted. Although severely lacking in confidence to speak up when surrounded by people I always felt were probably a lot more clever and articulate than I was, I quickly developed a reputation among the group as The Guy Who Was Good At Editing The Podcast, so my seat in pretty much every episode was all but assured, and I made a (now-defunct, and apparently non-archived) website that left a written record of all the podcast episodes and the things we discussed. (The episodes themselves, thankfully, survived — you can find them all on my Soundcloud.)

For a while, things went well, and friendships solidified. I even made the trip across the pond to visit various other members of the Squad (who were mostly North America-based) on multiple occasions, and we played host to some Squaddies on at least one occasion that I recall.

We changed the format in which we discussed things several times over the podcast's complete run, shifting from the "book club" format to focusing on a particular topic and bringing our own examples to the table. Things were good, for a while. Then we stumbled across Katawa Shoujo, a visual novel about a boy with a heart condition and how he came to love a group of girls with disabilities that he came into contact with when they all attended the same special school.

Katawa Shoujo was — is — a thoroughly interesting cultural artifact, if you're unfamiliar. It stems from the work of an independent Japanese artist named RAITA (if I remember correctly), who sketched some girls who had various forms of physical disabilities. Various members of the notorious imageboard 4chan found these images somewhat striking, and so, seven years after the original images' publication, they took the unusual step of forming a development collective of individuals from all across the world in order to bring these characters to life. The result was an absolutely fascinating visual novel that handled the subject matter infinitely more sensitively than anyone would have ever expected, given the origins of the development team being a website commonly referred to by many (not without cause) as a "cesspit".

In keeping with the visual novels that tended to come west at the time of its release, Katawa Shoujo was a sexually explicit game, featuring erotic scenes between the protagonist and each of the various heroines. Unsurprisingly, this made some people uncomfortable, particularly given the high school setting of the game and the way it (like many other localised Japanese works) left the cast members' ages somewhat ambiguous. And, although we had a great podcast discussion about the game itself — during which several of us opened up emotionally more than we'd ever done in public before — some damage had been done to our group. I don't blame the folks who splintered off or their reasons for it, but I am still sad that it happened, because it marked the beginning of the end.

We managed a few more episodes post-Katawa Shoujo, but eventually things petered out. We'd had plans for a Squadron of Shame website with its own forum to host discussions just like in the Good Old Days, but it took a long time for those to come to fruition, and it never quite built up the same momentum as in the 1up.com era. Eventually, it fizzled out completely, and after many years of reflection I probably can't say with any confidence that I was completely blameless in this.

Around the time of our Katawa Shoujo discussions, I'd started getting to know one of our members known as "Shingro" a bit better, and he was particularly interested in anime, manga and Japanese games. He, along with a couple of other people I knew in other places online (including Google+, remember that?) had given me some recommendations for some localised Japanese games to try — games that never got much attention from the press, weren't received particularly positively when they did, but which were likely to appeal to anyone who "got" what Katawa Shoujo was going for. Among those games were the early entries in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, the Atelier Arland series and the Ar Tonelico series.

I played and absolutely adored all of those games, and, along with Katawa Shoujo, found that I was experiencing something unusual and interesting: I was enjoying games that felt like they had been tailor-made to suit me and the way what I would later come to recognise as my neurodivergent brain worked. I recognised that they likely wouldn't appeal to everyone for a wide variety of reasons — and not just the sexually provocative element. They were unabashedly cheerful, they were colourful, they were often gleefully experimental (and not always successfully so) with their game mechanics, and their voice acting had a lot of screeching and shouting, particularly if you played in Japanese.

But I liked them for that; they knew their audience, and they unashamedly catered to that audience and no-one else with a laser-like focus. I started to discover hidden depths in these games; even the most silly-seeming ecchi titles, like Senran Kagura Burst, had something interesting to say, and they often had a lot less shame about it than many mainstream titles, many of which were still in their "dark and edgy equals mature" phase. In stark contrast to my growing disillusionment with triple-A games — Gears of War was my absolute last straw in this regard, as I hated that game and pretty much swore off "big games" after that — I felt like I was discovering gaming afresh for the first time.

And, naturally, I wanted to share the way these games made me feel. So I did. And for a while, things were okay, until I saw a few messages that made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Messages that, while it almost certainly wasn't the intent, given the sources, made me feel like I was being judged for the type of entertainment I was enjoying — entertainment that, let's not forget, I had recently come to feel was "speaking" to me like pretty much never before in my gaming career. Words like "creepy" and "perverted" were bandied about a bit too readily, and I… did not like that.

For a bit of context, I was struggling in my personal life around this time. (So what else is new?) Shortly after I took one of the aforementioned trips across the pond to meet some Squad members at PAX East in Boston, I split up with my first wife. And I… did not handle it very well. I felt betrayed, broken, utterly destroyed, and the things that I could cling onto for some degree of comfort in those trying times were of increasing importance to me. By the time Katawa Shoujo and the aforementioned other games came along, I was several years deep into A Difficult Time and, although I had met Andie, the wonderful person who is now my wife, I was still struggling and in great need of comfort.

I started to get frustrated when I saw the things I enjoyed come under what I perceived to be "attack". In the early to mid 2010s, this really started to come to a head, as the modern progressive movement started to really raise its head online — and was being more than a little abrasive about it, with public shaming often being the weapon of choice. In retrospect, I recognise how effective this can be — and how flaccid groups like the USA's Democratic party appear when they're not willing to step up and confidently declare their opponents to be Bad People — but at the time, I did not like it, particularly as I saw people I knew and cared about caught in the crossfire on multiple occasions.

At this point I should clarify that I have always had beliefs that are broadly in line with what one would call "progressiveness". I believe that straight white men have indeed been in a position of power and privilege for many years, and that marginalised groups, including women, have had an uphill struggle to stand on the same level — and that it is the responsibility of those who are in positions of power and privilege to help others up, so we can all benefit. I believe trans rights are human rights, I believe everyone has the right to love whoever they want to love, regardless of gender, and I believe racism is something we should have left behind long ago, and that it doesn't go challenged nearly often enough these days.

At the same time, part of my frustration stemmed from those mid-2010s feeling like I was being demonised for my gender and my sexuality in particular. I am sure at least part of this was down to my vulnerability at the time, but when I saw articles literally branding people who liked certain games as "creepy", "paedophiles" and "sex pests", I didn't like it. At all. Striving for equality, I felt, shouldn't mean dragging people down — particularly when there's a lot more nuance to the situation than just "white straight man = privileged". As someone having difficulty with my own personal situation — and what I later learned was neurodivergence — I certainly didn't feel like I was in the same position as the hypothetical straight white bogeyman, sitting in his suit with his perfect white teeth, counting his money and posting slurs on the Internet.

So I lashed out. There are numerous posts on both this blog and on MoeGamer where I did just that: I attempted to express how I was feeling about this. I attempted to express how these things that were important to me made me feel — and how it made me feel when I was called all manner of horrible names simply for what I liked, including by former colleagues. When I left USgamer, I was subject to some absolutely horrible abuse from an individual who joined the organisation as I was on the way out, and I received absolutely no support from anyone when that happened.

All this, as you might expect, eventually attracted the attention of the Gamergate crowd, who also counted among their number people who liked sexually provocative (or explicit) games, just like I did, and seemed to be forming a community of like-minded folks. I recognised even in the early days that Gamergate — and particularly its subreddit, KotakuInAction — was a scarlet letter, so I always took care not to publicly associate myself with the movement or even express support for it, particularly as things escalated and it became clear that no, for some of those people, it really wasn't about ethics in games journalism.

I maintain to this day, however, that among the early Gamergate crowd were some genuinely good people who wanted change for the better — and in a few cases actually achieved meaningful change that didn't involve any sort of bigotry — but with the inherently disorganised nature of the whole thing, it was, in retrospect, very easy for it to become an alt-right pipeline, and for bad actors to take control of things. And, as silly as it may sound for a dispute supposedly over video games to have such power, I firmly believe that at least part of the reason the world (particularly the online world) is in such a mess today is down to Gamergate.

Although I continued not to associate myself with Gamergate or its supposed beliefs, I found supporters from among its members for what little overlap we had. And I won't lie, it was nice to feel like there was someone who supported the way I felt, regardless of where they'd chosen to plant their flag. I found people who seemed to understand me, many of whom were on the periphery of the whole "culture war" by choice, much like I was, but who often got dragged into things whether they wanted to or not.

I continued to feel frustrated and vulnerable, though, like I was being pushed aside by people I had once called friends and a community I had once felt part of, all for the things I enjoyed. I continued to lash out, including towards people who had once been good to me, close friends, all because I felt like they had "sided" with people who didn't value my opinion, who wanted to brand me some of the worst names you can call people. And all because I liked anime-style games that occasionally crossed a line into sexual provocativeness or explicit scenes.

I said some things that I regret on multiple occasions, and I am deeply sorry about that. I recognise today that, in retrospect, I was standing at the very mouth of the alt-right pipeline and, if I had made some very different choices, I would be in a far worse situation than I am in today. Thankfully, I eventually recognised the danger I was in, and successfully changed my ways in such a way that I could continue to enjoy the things I loved without putting myself at risk of becoming one of those "everything I don't like is WOKE" idiots who infest online discourse today. And one of many positive results from that was a very enjoyable period in charge of Rice Digital, which subsequently led to my current position with Evercade — a job that, were it not for the necessity to check in on social media every day when I have otherwise mostly abandoned it for my personal life, would be 100% a dream assignment.

That doesn't change the regrets I have, though, and I wish I had come to the above realisation sooner than I did. There was still a period where I was in a bad place, and doing bad things, whether or not I really intended to. I deeply regret lashing out and pushing people away, and I wish I could make up for what I did, regardless of my reasons for it.

The reasons don't even matter any more; all that remains is the result, that being that I am growing older, I am mostly alone (except, thankfully, for the blessings that are my wife, cats and family) and in complete and utter despair at the mess I've made of my interpersonal relationships over the course of the last decade and a half.

I have many regrets. I am sorry to those I hurt. And I want to make things right. I just don't know how.

So this post is, hopefully, a start.

If you're reading this and you used to know me before… all this, I would like to know you again. I'm sure both our lives are very different to how they once were, hopefully for the better. On the whole, my life is much better than it was 10-15 years ago.

But I wish I hadn't lost those 10-15 years, and all the people I lost with them.

I am sorry to those of you I pushed away, either consciously or unconsciously. I am sorry to those of you I hurt. It doesn't matter if it was deliberate or not; if I hurt you, I hurt you, and I am sorry.

I just want things to go back to how they were during that one brief time in my life when I can say I was happy, when I felt I was accepted, when I felt I was among "my people". I know it can never be exactly the same as it once was. But I'm willing to put in the work needed to rebuild, reconnect and rekindle lost friendships.

Whatever it takes.

Thanks for reading.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 251: I'm Also Here Because I Was a Forum Poster (or: Reflections on Losing a Community, Mistakes Made and a Desire to Reconnect) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It is the end of what has been a long and stressful week, but I think today was actually reasonably productive, so hopefully next week I will feel a bit better about things. I still want to take a bit of time off sometime soon, but I'm feeling somewhat less in the "I need to get out right now" panic that I feel like I was in the other evening.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the world is still burning around me, but at least in my own little haven of calm here, things are pretty peaceful. Andie is painting the stairs, the cats are sitting either side of me napping, I have no other commitments besides this blog this evening, and I don't have to get up tomorrow if I don't want to. Not a lot to complain about there, really.

It's important to take a step back from the chaos of life in the 21st century every now and again and consider How Things Really Are. A good means of visualising this is imagining what life would be like if you unplugged the Internet and had no means of being contacted besides someone calling you on your phone or stopping by your house. If you can look at your life from that perspective and see that things are, for the most part, Okay, then you should probably do your best to keep seeing things from that angle when you plug the Ethernet cable back in.

Because ultimately, as shit as some of the stuff going on in the world can be, there's little you can probably do about it, particularly if you're far away from the Bad Things. Take the situation in America, for example; I am concerned for the safety and wellbeing of the people I know over there, of course, but practically speaking, there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect that whole situation. Things are different for those in the middle of that whole shitshow, of course — and I'm gratified to see that at least some folks are waking up to the fact that posting disapproving messages on a social network is not the same as getting out there and Doing Activism — but from where I'm sitting, all I can really do is be a supportive ear if people need it and not be a jerk to those who are Dealing With Shit.

It's difficult to keep your mind trained to think in this way, particularly when the buzz of Online is always there, encouraging you to check in on things and "just see how bad things have gotten". You can tell yourself all you want that you're doing it because you find it darkly humorous rather than utterly terrifying, but deep down, you, of course, know that all you're doing is deliberately and wilfully making your own mood darker for no real discernible benefit to your life as a whole.

That may sound callous. That may sound uncaring. But at some point you have to disconnect. At some point you have to focus on yourself and the people directly around you. At some point you have to remember that as enriching and fulfilling and exciting as an online life can be, it will always have to play second fiddle to your Real Life. Your Real Life is in the here and now, surrounding you, defining you. Your online life can be made to go away by just pulling out that Ethernet cable. And, as long as you haven't stumbled into any situations where your online life has seeped into your Real Life — which is an increasing risk these days, I will concede — you can just go about your day.

That's what I'm going to attempt to keep telling myself, anyway. The alternative just feels like perpetual misery.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 245: Unplug appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I, as you probably know, have a YouTube channel. I have had it for a grand total of about seventeen years at the time of writing, though I would say I've only really been actively, semi-regularly using it since about 2018, initially to host video versions of a podcast I was doing, and subsequently to kick off the series that I'm still running in one form or another to this day.

Over the course of those 17 years, I have picked up just over 3,600 subscribers at the time of writing, with the vast majority of those showing up since 2018. While that is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to big, successful channels out there, I am pleased with it, and honestly I don't particularly want my channel to grow any faster.

In order to acquire those 3,600 subscribers, I have done… nothing particularly special, to be perfectly honest. I have steadfastly ignored the advice of YouTube "gurus" to pursue trends, to be clickbaity with titles and thumbnails, and to "edit for engagement". In short, I consistently reject what is supposed "best practice" in favour of just doing whatever the hell I want — and I have seen some success doing just that. Could I see more success if I was following the supposed "rules" to the letter? Quite possibly. But then I don't think my channel would be mine any more.

One of the things I object to most about online culture in general these days — not just YouTube, but this applies all over — is how no-one really seems to have a personality any more. Everyone says the same things, everyone responds to things in the same way, everyone uses the same bank of reaction GIFs when they can't be bothered to use their words. In YouTube, this is best exemplified by the way you could watch five randomly chosen videos from five moderately sized channels, and I bet you'd hear the exact same sound effects and music clips, and see the exact same visual memes, in at least half of them — if not all of them.

This is because these things, supposedly, work. But in using that "best practice", you are eliminating a lot of the soul from your own work. You're making something that caters to the mysterious "algorithm" — or rather, an imaginary audience — rather than expressing yourself, as yourself. It's the same with the way people talk to one another online; because those reaction GIFs and snippy retorts like "skill issue" are universally understood by everyone, everyone uses them because they're seen as an efficient means of communication.

But, again, there's no personality there. Any time someone comes out with "skill issue" or "tourist" or whatever the derogatory term-du-jour is, I lose all interest in getting to know that person, just as I lose interest in a YouTube video the moment they start busting out the Metal Gear Solid alert noise, The X-Files theme and Spongebob "a few moments later" interstitial cards… and just as, at some point in the last 20 years, you've probably lost interest in someone who won't shut up about bacon, won't stop saying "the cake is a lie" or thinks declaring that pineapple on pizza is "weird" is a daring and brave opinion to express.

People like that don't have a personality of their own; their personality is The Internet, Circa 2025. And, as we've pretty comprehensively established at this point, The Internet, Circa 2025 is not someone you'd want to bring home to meet your parents. It's someone who deserves to be kicked into a ditch 50 miles from the nearest town and left to rot.

So, as much as there are probably things I could do "better" with my YouTube channel, I choose not to do them. I don't feel the need to. I didn't create that channel to be famous, I didn't create that channel to be a huge "thing", I created it as a means of expressing myself and sharing my own, personal enthusiasm for things that are important to me. That's it. That 3,600 people like what I do enough to want to follow it without me resorting to "best practice" says something to me: it says "if you're happy, just keep doing what you're doing".

So that's what I intend to do.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 244: Is "best practice" the enemy of expression? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I think I am, as the title says, stressed. I yelled at the robot vacuum cleaner earlier because it was being a dimwit and chewing up loose threads rather than going back to its charging base. I get infuriated by stupid little acts of clumsiness that really shouldn't be as annoying as I am feeling they are right now. And at work today I felt more overwhelmed than I've felt for a long time, for a variety of reasons.

I probably just need a good break to get away from… everything, so I'm going to see about getting a bit of time off in the not-too-distant future. Everything just feels like… a lot to deal with right now, and I'm not coping with it very well. It's the combination of a particularly busy patch at work, coupled with a few annoying specific stressors related to that (which I won't go into now), with The Situation in the world (particularly America) piled on top of that, and a general sense of helpless frustration at how, with every passing day, I feel less and less like I really "belong" in the world we're apparently building.

Take the AI thing. As time goes on, more and more people seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that the lake-boiling plagiarism machines don't appear to be going away, so we "might as well" embrace them because you shouldn't get "left behind". As far as I'm concerned, the ones being "left behind" are the ones wilfully giving up their own skills — and the opportunity to learn new ones — in favour of typing a fucking prompt into a dumbshit autocorrect that hallucinates complete bullshit a statistically significant proportion of the time.

Earlier on, someone posted (mockingly, thankfully) a "tool" that allowed people to generate Bluesky posts using AI. If you're too much of a lazy cunt to think of 280 characters you want to share on a social network, you shouldn't be using that social network. Now, granted, I absolutely fucking hate the vast majority of the time I have to spend doing social media posts for work, but I'm still not going to use AI to generate them, because I know it'll be just as much work checking through all the dross it produces to ensure it's not saying anything fucking stupid or completely fabricated.

I checked in on LinkedIn for the first time in like 15 years the other day, and was horrified to see how much generative AI is all over the place on that platform. LinkedIn is already a place that joy goes to die, so it doesn't surprise me to see tools for generating vapid slop placed front and centre there. I can't think of anywhere I want to hang out less. It was already insufferable before people could just get a machine to generate their "inspirational" posts about what the coffee they had that morning taught them about B2B sales, and now… God.

I'm wound up, I'm irritable, and I just want to… escape for a bit. So once I've dealt with my most pressing commitments, I'll be doing everything I can to ensure that I can take a bit of time to get my shit together and calm down a bit. Because feeling like this probably isn't good for me. I've seen the endpoint of feeling like this, and it's not pretty. I don't want to end up there again.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 243: I think I'm stressed appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I fucking hate TikTok, and while I know there are all sort of "considerations" about the American ban of it that is happening right now — and which people seem to think Trump will overturn when he takes office — you are never going to convince me that it was a good thing for humanity as a whole. I feel like it is an app which has actively made the world more stupid, less inclined to pay attention to things and generally quite a bit shitter.

As an autistic person, I actively despise the idea of an app where a significant number of videos are either someone shouting directly "at" me, or outright sensory overload. Hell, a whole term was coined to describe the proliferation of these sensory overload videos, and that term is "sludge content". That is not something we should be celebrating.

A common pro-TikTok argument that people make is that "some people were reliant on it for income". If your sole employable skill is yelling incoherently into a camera, you should probably spend some time working on employable skills other than yelling incoherently into a camera. If you were using TikTok as a means of selling things, you should perhaps consider selling your things via a platform you actually have control over, like people had been doing for years before TikTok, and like people will continue to do for years from hereon. And if you really want to make money from videos, there are plenty of other means of doing so.

But then there's also the fact that people place a vast overemphasis on "monetising their content" online these days anyway. It's one of the major factors in the gradual degradation of social media as an actual means of socialising over the last decade and a half. A significant proportion of users are no longer interested in having conversations — you know, being social — on social media these days. Instead, they want to "create content" for others to "consume". How about you stop seeing dollar signs in everything you do and just do something because it's enjoyable, and because you might make some friends in the process? No?

"But you can watch sexy girls dancing on TikTok!" Brother, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but there are myriad ways to watch sexy girls dancing — and doing a lot more than that — on the Internet, and there has been pretty much since its inception. If your argument for Why TikTok is Good, Actually is that you can mindlessly dribble over something that makes your peepee hard, you are not providing a convincing argument.

"But what about BookTok?" What about all the myriad book-centric blogs that have been destroyed by the collective destruction of the world's attention span via shit like TikTok and YouTube Shorts? What about the fact that your average TikTok user almost certainly doesn't have the patience or brain power to sit down and read a book if they won't read a blog post? What about the fact that authors don't want to have to waste their fucking time yelling at their phone camera when they would much rather be writing something worthwhile?

TikTok is shit, and while I see and appreciate the arguments against the US banning it, I will be shedding precisely zero tears for it. It is one of the absolute worst examples of the enshittification of the modern Internet and people in general, and nothing you can say will ever make me change my mind on that fact. I just wish the fucking thing would go away here, too.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 226: I wish the TikTok ban was worldwide appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am, as you'll know if you've been reading this here blog for a while, suffering from a fair old bit of loneliness. As the years have gone by, groups of friends have gradually drifted away, and it feels like one of the longest holdouts in that regard is heading in that direction of late. I haven't heard from anyone in this group for probably several months at this point, and to be honest, I'm burnt out.

Here's my problem, see: I'm lonely, but I'm also absolutely exhausted feeling like the only one trying to make an effort to keep friendships going or to try and "fit in" places. I'm a member of several online communities (well, let's be real, Discord servers at this point, since self-contained online communities barely seem to be a thing any more) but the prospect of trying to raise my head, say hello and generally get "noticed" in some way is just… deflating. It almost doesn't feel worth the effort. It feels like fighting my way out of quicksand.

Take this group I'm referring to, for example. I have been feeling for quite some time that if I don't say something and attempt to start a conversation, no-one says anything. And indeed, I must confess, over the past few months I simply haven't said anything, just to see if that was actually the case. I had gotten tired, you see, of every time I attempted to start a conversation resulting in the things I said getting either shut down or ignored. In particular, I have tried to express enthusiasm for the things I've worked on professionally — which I'm very proud of — and my own creative projects — which likewise I want to share with people who are important to me — and have found myself rebuffed. And it seems no-one wants to talk about anything that is important to them, either, so silence it is.

This is not a healthy way to be, I know, but I feel frustrated and resentful any time I feel like I'm the only one who has been making an effort with a friendship. And so, day by day, I feel myself retreating further into my own private world, and feeling less inclined to want to come out and show myself.

Well, no. It's not that. It's that I find doing so to be immensely draining, particularly when it's in an environment or situation I find uncomfortable. Take our work Christmas outing recently for example; while we were out there were several people who clearly wanted to make an effort to get to know me a bit better, and I had those conversations where I could — but because we were in an inordinately noisy environment where it was very difficult (and uncomfortable) to have a conversation, I didn't feel like I could really carry things on. It was too tiring. I felt bad, because it was people showing an honest interest in me, but I just couldn't keep trying to have a conversation while I couldn't hear anything.

I ended up bowing out of the evening relatively early because my senses had just been completely overwhelmed by the noise. I had a good time overall; I just knew I couldn't take any more.

It sort of feels like a variation on that at other times. I don't want to be a lonely recluse who never talks to anyone, but when I never get anything back when I do attempt to initiate something — and when no-one else seemingly wants to initiate things with me without me prompting them — I get to a point where it just doesn't feel worth trying any more, which I fear will eventually build into actively pushing people away if and when they do ever reach out.

Perhaps the thing to do is just to accept that this is the way things are, and to try and structure my life accordingly. If people aren't going to make the effort themselves but they are still, for one reason or another, actually important to me, then I make some time to ensure that I get heard. It doesn't have to be much; perhaps just set aside a time each week to drop a quick message to the group in an attempt to start a conversation. That feels very formal, I know, and that's one of the reasons I haven't done something like this sooner — but right now it feels like doing something overtly "artificial-feeling" might be the only way I get my almost completely drained "Social" meter back up into the green.

I should probably mention at this point that I am inordinately grateful to my good pal Chris, who has stuck by me through exceedingly thick and enormously thin, and always has a kind word and receptive ear any time I drop him a message. The only trouble is he's on the other side of the world to me, so not someone I can just drop in on for some beers and video games.

My wife Andie is and always has been a rock, too, and any time I start feeling lonely I am grateful that I am not completely alone, thanks to her, our two cats (who both know to come and look after me when I'm feeling low — they're both sat with me on the sofa as I type this) and, of course, my family, who just accept me as I am, with all my myriad flaws.

Is that enough, though? It doesn't feel like enough. Something in my mind remains intensely dissatisfied in my socialisation, and I need to do something about it. So, as tempting as it is to just wallow in despair at things gradually getting worse on their own without my input… I guess it's time to acknowledge that I need to provide that input if I ever want things to get better again.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 203: A distressing dichotomy appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Why am I still doing this? Or, perhaps to the point, why did I start doing this again? This article from Aftermath does a good job of explaining why.

Since the rise of social media, I feel like it's significantly less likely for someone to have a "personal website", because everyone is concerned about their "reach" and "engagement", and if you want both of those things, you want to be on a well-established social media site.

But if you're more concerned with self-expression and having a space to truly call your own, having your own website is hard to beat. And I think as people become more and more disillusioned with social media — Twitter and Facebook in particular — I think personal websites are going to become more and more important to a wider range of people.

Times have changed a bit, though. The word "blog" seems to have fallen out of wide usage, to be replaced with "newsletter", this being a result of the assumption that people will sign up to get your posts delivered to them via email, rather than going out of their way to visit your site. However, most of the "newsletters" out there are actually just blogs: people having a space to call their own, writing whatever they feel like at any given moment.

The best blogs… sorry, newsletters… of course have a distinct focus. One of my favourites is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is one of the few sites out there continually taking the garbage of the AI industry and other enshittified parts of the Internet to account for their making life worse for everyone.

And, of course, if you've been following me for a while, you'll know about my own MoeGamer, which is my main video game blog. MoeGamer has now outlived all of the professional, commercial sites I have ever written for, which is a nice feeling. Sure, I don't update it every day or indeed regularly, but there's a ton of stuff to read on there, and I've made sure all of it is hopefully relevant and interesting, regardless of when you come to it. No racing to get "news" out the door; no rushing games to meet embargoes; just in-depth articles about games that, for one reason or another, I have found it worthwhile to spend some time, effort and words talking about.

This site, though, this is mostly for me. This site is my virtual replacement for the personal diaries I used to write as a teenager, only at no point have I become embarrassed enough about something I've written to want to throw the whole thing in the outside bin so it would never be found by anyone, except maybe the dustmen, who I hope had a good laugh about how much I fancied Nikki Rose before flinging the book into landfill. This site is my reminder of at least part of my time on this planet which, for sure, has had some hefty ups and downs over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

Does it have many people reading it? No. But I'm not doing it for them. I'm doing it for myself — and if anyone happens to stumble across this little corner of the Internet and gets something out of something I've written, that's just a happy bonus.

If you've never given this sort of thing a try and you find yourself frustrated at social media, I can highly recommend giving it a go. It's dead easy to get started with a platform like WordPress or its numerous imitators; in many cases, you can get up and running for free, too.

However you choose to do it, I can assure you of one thing: having a space to truly call your own, in which you can express yourself completely freely, is something that I've started to find increasingly important with each passing year. It's a good thing to have an outlet, for both the good feelings and the bad, and banging out 500-1000 words every so often just about whatever's on your mind is a healthy habit to get into.

That's why I'm still doing this. Not to be famous, not to make money, not to get engagement and followers. But because it's just something I want to do, and which I find is of great benefit to my overall wellbeing. Give it a try!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 174: Why am I still doing this? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been umming and ahhing about whether or not to post this, but if I can't speak freely on my own fricking website, I think I'll explode, so I'm going to say it anyway.

I really, really don't give a damn about any drama surrounding an individual behind a particular project. I'm not saying you have to feel the same way, but I do want to express that I find it continually tiresome and genuinely upsetting when I want to talk about something that I think is cool, but the first response is always "but [individual] worked on it, so it's bad (and by extension you are bad for having anything positive to say about it)".

I'm not going to talk about specific cases here, because even doing that has the potential to attract ire towards me, and that's not what this post is about. What it is about is the sense of frustration I feel that the real people who worked on a project end up getting punished for the actions or behaviour of one individual — and, by extension, the attacks people who express enthusiasm for that project end up suffering also.

It is an unfortunate fact of capitalist life that in order to claw your way up to the top of the heap, you probably have to be a bit of a shithead. The way capitalism works, the way business works; you need to be a bit of a shithead in order to see success. You need to doggedly pursue the things you want to achieve, and you need to defend your commercial interests. This is true for pretty much all industries, whether it's groceries, tech, publishing or whatever. I defy you to find any company out there with an executive suite that has never done anything you're not a particular fan of, all in the name of either pursuing their goals or defending their commercial interests.

Trouble is, when the higher-ups at a company do something that is regarded as "bad" or "indefensible", the real people who suffer are those who are just doing their job underneath. When one CEO behaves poorly, the people who are actually making the products that CEO's company is known for end up getting punished for it. They could do an absolutely amazing job on whatever they worked on, but still get punished because their boss once did "A Bad Thing", often several years ago.

This, unfortunately, spreads outwards. Because "(CEO = Bad) = (Company = Bad)", anyone who then expresses an interest in or an enthusiasm for the products of Company gets yelled at by people who care more about the CEO than the company or the product. And that leaves people feeling like they simply can't express their enjoyment of something they like just as a product, because of one thing the CEO did half a decade ago.

CEOs should, ideally, not do shit things. It would be lovely if we lived in a world where CEOs did not feel the need to do shit things, be it in the name of pursuing their goals or defending their interests. But we do not. And frankly, I am, I'm afraid, long past giving a shit.

I've seen too many pointless, unnecessary arguments and too many strained, even broken friendships over this sort of thing, and it just doesn't matter. We live in a joyless enough world as it is; we should not be attacking one another over the things we choose to have fun with, so long as those things are not actively hurting someone. And in the specific instances I'm thinking about here, no-one is getting hurt except the folks who worked on them, and the people being attacked for daring to say something positive about them.

That's all I'm going to say on the subject. I do not want an argument on this, I do not want anyone in the comments trying to tell me I'm wrong for feeling this way. I'm fed up and I'm annoyed, and I am absolutely not in the mood for someone to tell me I'm wrong for feeling that way. So if you're gearing up to type a comment like that, zip it. I do not want to hear it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 170: I really don't care about drama appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It seems like Twitter's day in the sun is finally coming to an end. With the deadline looming for the site to start scraping everyone's posts to train its AI models, Elon being an absolute fucking maniac (not in a fun way) and Trump being in office, a lot of people — including some well-established figures and brands — have been jumping ship and turning to Bluesky. Hell, even the Clifton Suspension Bridge has decided to ditch Twitter. And no, I'm not making that up.

I haven't been following the progress of all the "Twitter alternatives" that sprang up a while back too closely, but it seems like a lot of people are favouring Bluesky, which I must confess is one that I've been on for a little while now. Threads sounds like an absolute dead end of a social network — tech commentator Ed Zitron describes it as "Twitter made of Instagram comments" — and the less said about shit like Gab, Truth Social and Parler (does that one even still exist?) the better.

I'm interested to see where things will go. The vibe on Bluesky right now is very positive; many folks quite rightly describe it as feeling like Twitter from 10+ years ago, and they're absolutely right in terms of atmosphere. The users have collectively decided to not allow it to fall into negativity and ragebait like Twitter has become in recent years, and there is a shared understanding that "block early and block often" is the best approach to anyone being a dickhead.

This is helped enormously by Bluesky's "nuclear block" function, which means that if someone quote-replies a post then blocks the person they quoted, the quote will appear as blocked for everyone. That helps prevent dogpiling and discourages people from going around looking for trouble. Couple this with the "detach quote" function, where if you do find yourself quote-replied and you're getting grief as a result, you can simply unclip your post from the quote and be left the fuck alone. Much better than Twitter's woefully ineffective mute and block functions — oh yeah, Twitter made block work so that anyone you blocked can still see your posts, which is… great.

At this point, anyone still on Twitter is in absolute denial. The place is infested with bots, scammers, right-wing fucknuts and Elon sycophants who want nothing more than just a crumb of billionaire dick to suck. And with the impending "AI" shit looming, I'm not surprised people have finally had enough. I'm certainly never going back, and I think my boss and I need to have a serious conversation about whether we start focusing our professional social media efforts on Bluesky instead of Twitter. There are a lot of cool retro game peeps over there, and I think Evercade would fit in well there.

Of course, there's always the thing to ponder: do people really want "brands" on a social media site? And I guess it depends what they're doing. If all they're doing is engagement bait crap, probably not. But this might be a fun opportunity to experiment with doing something a bit different, in a place with an altogether different vibe.

Something to consider next week, certainly — my boss is off this week, otherwise I'd have a chat with him about it tomorrow. In the meantime, Bluesky seems to be a pleasant enough place to hang out from a personal perspective, and a fair few people I know have showed up there. It's social media how it used to be before all those sites made us want to kill ourselves every day, and I'm sure that won't last forever. But while it does, we may as well enjoy it.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 160: The death of Twitter appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm pleased to report that all of us kicking up a stink over RoseTintedSpectrum's YouTube channel being wrongfully terminated yesterday has proven successful: our lad managed to finally get through to a human being at YouTube, and his channel has been reinstated, with just an obviously insincere, automated "apology" of sorts from YouTube attached.

This is obviously a good resolution to what was a stressful and upsetting situation for Rosie, and it should bring a few things into sharp focus for everyone. Corporations are not your friends. Corporations can and will take things that you have created away from you at a moment's notice. Corporations do not care, particularly when they rely on automation and "AI" to do their work for them.

Human beings are your friends. Individuals that you make a personal connection with are how you get by in this increasingly horrible world that we live in. Friendship groups and communities can get things done — the last 24 hours has clearly proven that, with Rosie's story not only spreading across Twitter and temporarily drowning out at least some of the white supremacy thanks to the few creators with a decent following who are still there, but also making some noise on BlueSky and even getting a writeup on the retro gaming website from the NintendoLife folks, Time Extension.

I find it kind of hilarious, tragic and frustrating that there are some folks who took glee in this whole situation. People such as the odious George "FunkySpectrum" Cropper, who has made his entire online life about spreading hatred of people he doesn't like. And people like one anonymous stroppy twat who goes by "GlamorousAlpaca" in Time Extension's comments, who just made shit up about Rosie for no apparent reason. But as frustrating as the sad, pathetic existence of these people is, they will never know the joy that Rosie is undoubtedly feeling right now: the understanding that there are people out there who like him, care about him and will fight for him when he has been wronged.

I'm glad that all this has been successfully resolved, but I'm concerned that this sort of thing seems to be happening a lot more of late. The cynic in me blames the rise in the use of "AI" in big corporations like Google; despite these systems being demonstrably fallible and prone to hallucinations, it seems big business is willing to trust its judgement, even going so far as to give it the power to completely remove someone's hard work from the Internet for a perceived (and, I reiterate, non-existent) infraction. It happened to me with WordPress.com, it happened to Rosie on YouTube and I'm sure we'll hear about it happening to other people, too.

The Internet continues to enshittify itself, but we can still find havens of sanity amid groups of like-minded, sensible, supportive and caring people. If you have been fortunate enough to find a group like that online, be sure to hold on to them with everything you have. I feel like they will only become more valuable to you as time goes on.

Oh, while you're here, go pop RoseTintedSpectrum a subscribe if you haven't already. Watch a few vids and leave a couple of nice comments, too. The lad could do with a smile after the last 24 hours.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 157: A happy ending (not in a sex way) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hello. Bit of a serious one today. Many of you reading this will likely be familiar with the YouTube channel RoseTintedSpectrum. He has suffered an extremely unfortunate happening today in that YouTube has seen fit to completely obliterate his entire channel. Their reasoning? He supposedly violated their policies about "spam, scams and deceptive practices". Needless to say, he did not.

For the unfamiliar, RoseTintedSpectrum is someone who's been doing YouTube for a few years now. As the name of his channel suggests, he started out doing videos about old Spectrum games, and his dry humour and cynical wit won him a small but dedicated following of folks who enjoyed what he put out. Over time, he branched out into a niche that is somewhat underserved: providing commentary on "classic" TV shows, beginning with ITV's show about video games and computer culture, Bad Influence. Most recently, he has been doing huge retrospectives on the legendary GamesMaster, and these videos caused his channel to have a huge and well-deserved surge in popularity.

Well, they did, anyway. For reasons known only to YouTube's automated moderation algorithm, his channel has now been banished to the shadow realm, and he is unable to get a human response out of anyone. He attempted to appeal the "decision" and got a negative response back within 5 minutes, suggesting that no human being has been involved at any step in this process. And they have the gall to say on Twitter that "these decisions are made very carefully" and "thoughtfully". Are they fuck.

If all this sounds a little familiar, it's very similar to what happened with me and WordPress.com a while back — the reason this blog is now self-hosted rather than hosted with WordPress.com. That was almost the exact same situation: my hard work of many years (nearly 20 in my case!) was accidentally and incorrectly branded as "spam", and immediately removed from circulation without warning or any attempt to contact me. Thankfully, my repeated badgering and yelling at WordPress.com meant that it was back up and running again the next day, but the whole situation spurred me on to move my blog off-site.

There's a key difference there, though; while I could do that with my blog, YouTubers do not have that luxury. People who make videos are pretty much locked in to YouTube for life, because self-hosting videos is completely unworkable from both a storage space and bandwidth perspective. There are other video-hosting solutions out there, but they all have issues — no-one gives a shit about Vimeo (particularly now it's branded itself as "AI-powered") and Rumble is full of the absolute worst shitheads on the planet. So for most folks, it's YouTube or nothing.

I want to emphasise this key point: it is completely unacceptable for automated moderation tools to have the power to take a creator's hard work offline without even attempting to contact them. It is completely unacceptable that this occurs without any human input whatsoever. And it is completely unacceptable for YouTube's support team, when contacted about this issue, to say there is "nothing more they can do" because the automated appeal response to the automated channel deletion decided within less than five minutes that no mistakes had been made at any point in the automation process.

If a channel is flagged as being in violation of some sort of policy, that should be an immediate signal for an actual human to look at it. It should have taken anyone human less than five minutes to determine that there was nothing on RoseTintedSpectrum's channel even remotely related to "spam, scams or deceptive practices", and this whole situation should have never happened in the first place.

But no. Because big corpos like Google are all-in on AI and automation, they trust the clearly and demonstrably fallible machines to handle it all themselves — including any attempts to appeal the decisions. And the result is situations like we have now, where a dedicated and hard-working creative type is left with absolutely nothing to show for years of hard graft.

RoseTintedSpectrum puts an unbelievable amount of effort into each and every video he has ever made, and that should be abundantly clear to any human being looking at his channel.

But sadly, because no human being at YouTube has looked at his channel, we're left with the situation we're in now. Which is completely unacceptable.

If you're still clinging on to your Twitter account in the vain hope that the last week or so has all been a bad dream, I urge you to contact @TeamYouTube and @YouTubeLiaison over there to let them know they have made a huge mistake — RoseTintedSpectrum's YouTube account, if you want to copy that in, also, is @SpectrumTinted. With any luck, this will all be resolved sooner rather than later.

And if you're reading this and happen to be in any sort of position to make big decisions at your place of work: automated moderation solutions are fucking bad and should always have human oversight. So don't fucking delete people's hard work before you even attempt to contact them.

Sort it out, YouTube.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 156: A reminder that automated moderation solutions suck appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don't Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I've been playing recently.

I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It's really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.

There's also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a "rank" which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.

There's also a really great "rapid battle" system, where if you know what you're doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.

Anyway, it's half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 148: Stream Success appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, it is this week, anyway. Andie is going out for a friend's birthday in the evening, so I thought I might take the opportunity to do a bit of streaming. You, dear reader, are welcome to stop by. Here's my Twitch channel. I'll be streaming from about 8pm UK time, all being well, and the duration will depend on how much fun I'm having and whether anyone is actually chatting. I plan to go for at least an hour or two, though.

The game I've picked to stream is one I deliberately haven't started yet. It's Experience's dungeon crawler Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters and Gain Strong Weapons and Armor. You May Be Defeated, but Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be a Day When the Heroes Defeat the Devil King. I have picked this for several reasons:

1. I like Experience games.
2. I like dungeon crawlers.
3. It has a silly name.
4. As I understand it, it's a fairly light and breezy take on the dungeon crawler, so it should be eminently suitable for chatting while playing.

Now I'm sure anyone who is all about "optimising" their Twitch experience would recommend I play something people have actually heard of. But if you've ever paid my YouTube channel a visit you will know that I don't really give a shit about baiting the algorithm and getting huge viewing figures.

In fact, as I've discussed previously, I actually don't like it when a video does well, because after you crash through a certain number of views, people start to get a bit more mean and I'm not a big fan of that. So I'd rather just host a nice little comfortable stream for friends to drop in on as they see fit — and perhaps a few newcomers can pop along and learn a bit about a game they haven't seen before alongside me.

Streaming is something that, I know, you have to work hard at in order to get anywhere. To be honest, I'm not so fussed about trying to "make partner" or "go affiliate" or whatever — the thing that appeals to me about streaming more than anything else right now is the prospect of potentially making some human connections with people. I have been so bereft of good company beyond my wife and cats in recent years that I want to try various means of potentially meeting new folks. And streaming would seem like a potentially solid means of discovering people with similar interests that I might get along with.

I know that won't happen immediately. I'm fine with that. I've recorded lots of Let's Plays for YouTube, so I am intimately familiar with how to talk rubbish entirely to myself while playing a video game. But if some good conversation happens to come about? So much the better. We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, tomorrow evening, 8pm UK time. I'll let you work out what that is in your region. Let's hunt some monsters and have a good time!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 147: Saturday Night is for Streaming appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'll level with you, dear reader, I don't really know what to write about tonight, and it's already twenty past midnight, so I decided I would just start typing and see what came out. I had been looking for inspiration in past blog posts, but ended up just reading them rather than taking any actual ideas from them. It's times like this that I'm glad I've managed to keep this one site up and running for so long — even though it has had a few challenges in the last year in particular.

But anyway. Looking back at the blog posts I wrote more than 10 years ago — I was idly browsing through entries from January 2011 — I found it striking to ponder how some things have very much stayed the same (depression, anxiety, loneliness) and others have changed quite a bit.

In one post, for example, I noted a modest ambition of mine as being able to one day buy a brand-new car. To date, I have done that not once, but twice. Well, kind of. I got roped into one of those hire-purchase schemes because I am not good at talking to salespeople, and when the term on one was concluded, I was faced with either paying up several thousand more pounds to keep the car I'd already paid several thousand pounds into on a month-by-month basis, or switching to another new car and continue paying for that on a month-by-month basis.

Not having several thousand pounds to spare at the time, I chose the latter option, which resulted in me getting a worse car for more money. But at least when that one was up, I did have the money to spare to just finish purchasing it outright. Regrettably, it was due to my inheritance from my last remaining grandparent passing away — thanks, Nan D — but that same car is still sitting comfortably on my driveway and will hopefully last a good few years more yet.

Back in 2011, I don't think I would have ever contemplated having a nearly-new piano, which I do now. Of course, 2011 was right when I was in the middle of one of the worst periods of my life, having recently separated from my first wife and started enduring what, at the time, I thought was the great indignity of having to move back in with my parents. (My mental state was not good at the time. I mean, it's not good now, but it was really bad then. I am now, at least, genuinely and honestly grateful for that safety net I had and wouldn't like to think of what might happened to me had my parents not saved me from a very bad situation. But enough of that for now.)

On the whole, my life in 2024 is in a much better place than it was in 2011. I have a stable job that I like in a field I'm proud to be part of, a decent income, an incredibly supportive and understanding wife whom I love very much, two wonderful cats whom I also love very much, and a game collection that would blow the mind of my teenage self. In terms of general "life situation", I can't complain all that much.

But I miss people. As a socially anxious and introverted person, I'm sure that's not something the me of a decade or two back would have ever thought I'd say, but man. Loneliness fucking blows. And the longer it goes on, the harder it feels like it is to do something about it. There are people I probably could reach out to and attempt to rekindle past friendships, but what does one say in that situation, and via what medium?

I feel like I've had about a decade of everyone I know drifting away from me for one reason or another — or perhaps me drifting away from them, or perhaps both — and now I just don't really know how to handle that. I would like nothing more than to return to the good old days of the "Squadron of Shame" club on 1up.com and our later website and podcast, but I wouldn't even know where to begin recapturing those good old days — or even if it's possible to do so.

The one positive thing I've found in recent months is that social network BlueSky has a pleasing "early 2010s" Twitter vibe to it right now, and that is gradually helping me to build up a sense of online confidence that has been severely knocked over the course of the last decade or so.

That's a start, at least, as loathe as I am to rely on a social network website for interacting with people, knowing as I know now that all these services eventually go down the route of enshittification. Real-life, meanwhile, I have a lot more work to do in, as my present physical condition means that I'm afraid and/or ashamed to see anyone I used to know in person because of the amount of weight I gained over the COVID years, so that's going to be a harder, more long-term project, but, well, I guess I have plenty of time on my hands.

Well, then, how about that. "Nothing to write about," he says, then goes and rambles on for nearly a thousand words. I guess that's the approach to take when I can't think of anything, then. Just sit down and write. That's what #oneaday has always been about. And that's what I'll continue to do.

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The post #oneaday Day 139: Non-specific ramblings appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I type this, I can overhear my wife listening to some YouTuber I hate the sound of promising to "review every celebrity brand make-up". And this reminded me of a weird trend that is specifically a YouTube thing, whereby it seems like looking at just one thing is never enough, you've always got to do every instance of a thing.

I Ate At Every Margaritaville In the Country. I Watched Every Barbie Movie. I Played Every Poorly Reviewed Soulslike Game on Steam. This particular "style" of video always seems to be combined with some sort of deliberate suffering — both for the presenter and the viewer, I'd wager — and honestly, it just doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm the sort of person who would much rather take their time over exploring something sprawling in depth and detail than attempting to cram it all into one video — because I can't help but feel if you're cramming a massive amount of things into one video, each individual thing isn't going to get much of a look-in, is it?

I realise this is the point of some of these videos, either to highlight the fact that the many instances of Thing are almost identical to one another and thus can't really be distinguished, but it still irks me somewhat — especially when it comes to a lineup of things that is quite varied such as, say, the output of a particular software company. A video along the lines of "I Played Every Blizzard Game" feels like it would do none of the games any real justice, because each one is very different from the last and deserves its time to shine. Hell, even "I Watched Every Barbie Movie" is probably doing at least some of the Barbie movies a disservice.

My thinking along these lines is why I handled the "Atari A to Z Flashback" series on my YouTube channel as I did. Atari Flashback Classics for Nintendo Switch had 150 games, so I made 150 videos. It took a long time, but I came out of it feeling like I'd completed a worthwhile project — and I absolutely gained some new appreciation for a bunch of games from among that 150 that I otherwise wouldn't have if I'd just given them all a cursory glance and been done within 20 minutes.

Now I'm not saying that everything has to be an epic, long series or anything, and I suspect what I'm describing is more of a "me problem" than anything else. But I know that I, personally, would much rather take my time going through something with a lot of component parts, giving each piece time to digest and myself the opportunity to come to some conclusions that I might not otherwise have been able to if I was racing through to meet my "content deadline".

I guess that isn't what people want these days, though. They want short, quick-fire, snappy — because the modern Web has been set up to pander primarily to those with no attention span. But, as I've argued on several previous occasions, I fear that this just creates a vicious cycle, whereby people's attention spans get shorter and shorter, and the quality and depth people go into when writing or producing videos suffers as a result.

If someone doesn't have the attention span to stick around for more than 3 seconds, that's not my problem; that is very much their problem. I am gratified to see the recent growth in "newsletters" (or blogs, as we used to call them) that present long-form articles intended to be sat down with and savoured; they're not for everyone, sure, but it does please me to know that there are other people out there who enjoy life on the verbose side of things, and they don't care if they "lose" some people due to the sheer length of what they post. As I say, that's a reader problem, not a writer problem. No-one told Charles Dickens not to spend so many fucking pages describing fog — instead, he just gave anyone who couldn't handle it the finger, and his work continues to be regarded as a classic regardless. No-one's going to remember the names of any YouTube Shorts or TikTok creators in 50 years.

I think I got off the point somewhere. But yeah. Review one thing at a time, please. Then I might take your opinions seriously.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 135: Just one is fine appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we're going on holiday tomorrow. We'll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we've visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

• I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
• I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
• I will not look at Twitter at all.
• I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven't really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I've found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It's very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you're very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they're wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage "dunking", whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going "looking for trouble" because you can't even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it's a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I'm going to share anything about the holiday that isn't on this blog, I'll likely do so there. If you're a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don't put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I'm tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won't go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I'm going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven't decided yet. But it's going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it's last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we're away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"We Need".

It doesn't matter what you're posting online, someone somewhere will decide that the thing you just posted about is completely irrelevant, and that they have decided to take on the heavy burden of representing the entire audience of Thing.

"We Need".

Sometimes it's a thing you know is coming anyway, so you can't say anything. Sometimes it's a thing that has been previously requested, but which isn't practical right this second. And sometimes it's a completely outlandish, unreasonable suggestion that no-one who knows the slightest thing about the business you're working in would declare with such confidence that "We Need". Always, though, it's something other than the thing you have just posted about.

I know I'm not alone in this, because when I look at marketing posts from other companies, I inevitably see at least one "We Need" in the wild, fulfilling the exact same function outlined above. Talking about anything other than the thing that has just been announced or promoted, and instead speaking on everyone else's behalf that "we" are absolutely, completely and utterly entitled to a thing that hasn't even come up in conversation once.

Back around the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle — remember that? — I took umbrage at games journalists calling gaming enthusiasts "entitled" for whining at developers and publishers. I still don't think productive discussions were had back around then. But honestly, some 10+ years later, I 100% get it. It's downright exhausting to want to share things you're personally genuinely excited about that you've been working on, only to be hit with the inevitable "We Need"s.

I'm pretty sure this all stems from a broader issue online: the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction, where a certain, loud-mouthed proportion of people on the Internet are never satisfied with the thing that has just been put in front of them, no matter how excellent it is. Cool new thing just announced? Yesterday's news. "We need" the next thing, immediately, preferably sooner. Long-awaited and much-requested upgrade to something confirmed? Pish. "We need" something completely unrelated. Product getting excellent reviews from press and public alike? Balls. "We need" something that no-one else has asked for, ever.

This ties in with another theory I have about modern online discourse: the fact that there are people out there who don't feel like they have anything to say if they're not criticising. Saying "this is good" is anathema to them, because then they can't "offer feedback" or "give constructive criticism", even where none was asked for.

By contrast, I've often found that these people tend to do a better job of shutting down conversation than actually starting a worthwhile discussion. I've lost count of the number of times I've expressed my appreciation and enjoyment of something, only for someone to come along and feel the need to list everything they think is wrong with it, everything "We Need" to see fixed about it. When that happens, I just lose all interest in attempting to have a discussion, because that person isn't interested in knowing what I liked about the thing. They just want the opportunity to "offer feedback".

Feedback can be a helpful, useful thing under the right circumstances. But it needs to be asked for, or, in extreme cases, obviously needed. And by "needed" I mean "there is something demonstrably wrong with the thing", not "this one dude doesn't like the way the thing does something".

"We Need."

We need to learn to be satisfied and happy with things, because perpetual dissatisfaction is no way to live. Just stop for a moment and enjoy the thing. It's much more fun than never reaching a point where you can do that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 122: "We Need" and the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's a simple explanation for this, of course: it's engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting "Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television", the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say "Wow! I remember this!" and "SO NOSTALGIC!" and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn't interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn't always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are "good content". Some of these people will even get snippy if someone "steals" their "content", by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There's a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I'm not doing so just to go "this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed". Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you "shouldn't" post anything too long or in-depth online, "because people won't bother to read/watch it". This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can't read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that's what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible "because people will click off within 3 seconds" or whatever kind of insulting. It's insulting to the people who don't click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone's attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it's insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I've done isn't "interesting" within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I'm concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don't really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It's not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don't give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it's reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don't have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've tried streaming a couple of times and not had a terrible time doing it, but I fell off from doing it because I didn't really set aside a specific time to do it and haven't (yet) put in the work to try and get any sort of "community" going. To be honest, it's that "work" part that kind of puts me off a bit; one of the nice things about YouTube is that I've been able to just sort of do it slowly and gradually build up an audience naturally without having to faff about promoting myself or whatnot.

Twitch is a platform that is still quite alien to me. There's a lot I don't like about it. It's noisy and filled with distracting features that don't play nice with my autistic brain. I feel certain portions of the Twitch audience have unreasonable expectations of what a streamer can be expected to do to keep them "entertained". And I've seen far, far too many people burn themselves out because they "needed" to get Partner, or Affiliate, or whatever their monetisation program is called.

But at the same time, I kind of like the idea of having a platform where I might be able to make some new friends, chatting about the stuff I love. If I do decide to kick off some streaming, I'll almost certainly keep it retro-focused — at least partly because in my study, which is the place that is really "set up" for streaming, I don't have either a gaming PC or a current-gen console — but I think there's plenty of potential to cover things there, between Evercade, the various mini systems I have (Atari 8-bit, Amiga, C64 and, later this year, Spectrum) and, of course, the gigantic Launchbox library I have on a 5TB hard drive.

It's kind of a scary prospect, though. Even more so than YouTube, Twitch is "putting yourself out there" and inviting comment from any old random who happens to stop by. I should probably comfort myself with the fact that the kind of people I wouldn't want to engage with probably wouldn't be watching retro gaming streams, anyway — but it's still somewhat nerve-wracking.

Perhaps I'll give it a go this weekend as a sort of trial run. My wife is going into town with a friend for a bit, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to try some bits and pieces out back then. If you'd like to stop by, here's my Twitch page. No promises, but I have mentally "pencilled this in" for this Saturday, and we'll see how it goes.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 103: A solution? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For a small-scale sub-5,000 subscriber YouTuber like me, getting anything to break 1,000 views is significant. I've had a few successes over the last couple of years, and most of them have had something in common: they've been pre-scripted videos, as opposed to the "Let's Play" style I built my channel on, and which I think I probably enjoy doing the most.

Probably my most significant success to date is the above video, which covers the excellent modern isometric racer Super Woden GP. This video has, to date, managed 87,000 views and is still trickling along. This was absolutely overwhelming to watch happen, to such a degree that I ended up having to "pause" the comments section because I was getting so many people commenting.

My second best is the above, which covers Moonring, an excellent modern take on the classic Ultima RPG formula, developed by one of the folks who worked on the original Fable. Plus it's free. This one has been a slow burn; to date it's done over 29,000 views, but it got off to quite a slow start. Compare the graphs for these two videos.

Here's Super Woden GP 2:

And here's Moonring:

Notice that the latter one spiked for some inexplicable reason about 250 days after I posted it. I don't really know what happened here; I can only assume that it got shared somewhere and a lot of people showed up. But the analytics seem to suggest that YouTube just decided to suddenly start pushing it one day, so it started appearing when people were just browsing around the site:

The Yars Rising video hasn't done anything like the numbers of these two, but it's also still early days for it — at the time of writing, it's just two days old. But it's had a strong early push:

The one thing that the Yars Rising video has in common with the Super Woden GP 2 one in particular is that it was something timely. I made the video shortly after Yars Rising came out, when there was still some discussion going on about it. That, presumably, helps. But it doesn't account for what happened with the Moonring video.

Anyway, the point is, any time something like this happens, I end up wondering if I should change tack a bit with YouTube. The approach I've taken for the vast majority of my videos is one where I introduce a game with a bit to camera at the start, then do a "Let's Play", where I explain the game as if I'm sitting down to play it with the viewer.

Some of these videos have done quite nicely. This one, on Seven Cities of Gold for Atari 8-bit, broke a thousand views:

As did this one on Beamrider for Atari 2600, though that's over the very long term:

I like making those videos. I think they're a good way of helping people to understand how to play and figure out the appeal of retro games. And yet the numbers don't lie: what gets people watching is pre-scripted, more "review-style" videos.

Don't get me wrong, those are fun to write and to make, also — plus I can generally cross-post them between YouTube and MoeGamer for two completely different audiences to see them — but any time I ponder maybe switching to doing that kind of video all the time, I think of the people who have very kindly stuck with me since the earliest days of me fumbling around with the platform, figuring out what the hell I actually wanted to do with my YouTube channel.

I suspect it's not an "all or nothing" question. I suspect the answer is something I know already: that the optimal approach would be to do a bit of both. Perhaps "Let's Play" style videos on simpler, earlier games, and more elaborate scripted affairs for more complex, longer games.

I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. If I was a bigger channel I'd just say "fuck it" and start a second channel then split the two types of video between the two channels, but it seems foolish to do that as a small creator.

But anyway. I'm glad the Yars Rising video is doing reasonable numbers, at least. It's a cool game and I'm glad people want to know more about it. So if nothing else, I can be glad about that!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 102: Pondering YouTube... again appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As if the scourge that is YouTube Shorts wasn't enough, the latest feature that it's impossible to dismiss permanently — telling it to go away only makes it disappear for a month at most — is "YouTube Playables", a range of bottom-of-the barrel mobile game crap designed to placate the ever more attention-deficit body of users who can't possibly just do one thing at a time.

I honestly don't get it. Who looked at YouTube and went "you know what this needs? Shitty mobile games!" Who looked at Netflix and decided that needed to be a gaming platform? For that matter, who looked at fricking Facebook and thought games on there would be a good idea?

The argument that usually gets trotted out with this sort of thing is that it "gets more people into gaming". Frankly, I've always thought this to be bollocks. Gaming has never been more accessible and affordable on platforms that are specifically built for it, and there is only one possible reason it is being shoehorned in everywhere that it doesn't belong: to monetise the crap out of it, be it through ads, in-app purchases or subscription price hikes.

At this point I'd almost pay YouTube a fee to not have to see garbage like Shorts and Playables ever again. There are fundamental features of their platform that still don't work properly and they waste time with this shit? Someone wants firing.

But I guess someone, somewhere has decided this junk "adds value", so here we are, stuck with it, in yet another example of the Web being enshittified. At least there's no "AI" features in YouTube… yet. Don't you love our cyberpunk dystopian future?

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The post #oneaday Day 98: Feature Creep appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My daily blogging here? Something I'm doing by choice, and not punishing myself if I happen to fail to live up to. Forget a daily lesson on Duolingo, though, and you can expect to be on the receiving end of multiple guilt-tripping notifications (assuming you haven't turned notifications off for everything like I have) and emails with crying owls suggesting in no uncertain terms that you are an awful person for forgetting to study a foreign language today.

I tried Duolingo for a bit a few years back, and found it quite good, but eventually got annoyed with this. It's always bugged me about Wordle, too, because it doesn't just encourage you to play every day — it encourages you to cheat. Because you break your streak if you don't get the word. And what person in their right mind would break their streak when they can just Google "five letter words that end in READ"? (Me, that's who, though I am making no attempt to position myself as being in any way "of sound mind".)

Building healthy habits is, as I've said elsewhere on this blog, a good thing. It is also a difficult thing, and I think the prevalence of "streaks" everywhere these days actually makes things more difficult. The original intent behind this sort of thing — incentivise and reward continued engagement — may well have been honourable, but now it just feels cynical and manipulative, with Duolingo being by far the most obnoxious implementation of it by a long shot.

Streaks, as implemented via technology these days, are designed to get you addicted to the Skinner Box mentality: to get you checking in regularly so you make Number Go Up. More often than not there's no actual incentive to do anything beyond checking in to the service in question to keep your streak unbroken — though some sites (Duolingo again is guilty of this) also implement things like "leaderboards" to make things really unhealthy.

How do I know this is unhealthy? Because I've experienced it. Duolingo isn't incentivising you to do well by guilt-tripping you into checking in every day, or even by inviting you to attempt to top the leaderboards. It's encouraging you to game the system, because inevitably these systems are intensely, deeply fallible and can be manipulated without too much effort. And once you figure out how to do that — and a lot of people do — any value these systems might have once had in building healthy habits goes right out of the window.

If you need further evidence of how such systems are fundamentally broken, look at the PlayStation Trophies/Xbox or Steam achievements systems. In theory, these systems should enable people who are good at a game to be rewarded for that. What actually happens is that people deliberately purchase games where they can get an "easy Platinum" in order to buff up their statistics. More often than not, this takes the form of a visual novel that the person in question will just stick on fast-forward mode, ignore completely and then claim their completely pointless virtual shiny thing.

It's the same with Duolingo, or anything else that uses such a system. Why bother with letting the things you're learning truly sink in when you can just check in, quickly click through the answers until you get the right ones, then enjoy Number Go Up?

I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule — people who do find streaks helpful in motivating themselves. If that's you, and you use them honestly, fair play to you. Keep it up. But I've seen enough of how people behave in 2024 to know that is not the norm at all. If there's a way to cheat — even if doing so provides no real benefit whatsoever — then people will find and use it.

Now I'm off to go watch some Deep Space Nine. Wouldn't want to break my streak, now, would I?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 94: Streaks are unhealthy appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To be clear and completely transparent, around the time of Gamergate being active I may well have expressed some sentiments and concerns that might have got me lumped in with this crowd.

However, I made an effort to distance myself from the movement as a whole, because I could see it was something of a scarlet letter, regardless of whether or not an individual had legitimate, worthwhile concerns.

My issues were always to do with the games journalism side of things, with my particular focus being on reviews and articles that treated Japanese titles (particularly those which featured sexually provocative content) unfairly and from an ill-informed perspective. I steered well clear of any discussions where it was clear people were being full-on racist and sexist — i.e. objecting to a game because it had a woman in a leading role, or a non-white person appearing prominently. I was entirely concerned with how certain portions of games journalism were treating specific games — and the people who enjoyed them — like absolute shit: nothing more, nothing less.

To put it another way, I always thought the people who were objecting to "woke" content in games were being massive weirdoes, and I didn't want anything to do with them. Where games did feature obnoxiously over-the-top "look how progressive we are!" content, I tended to just steer clear of those — or perhaps comment on them in terms of alternatives that did the same thing, but better. To date, my favourite example of this is Read Only Memories and VA-11 HALL-A. Both of these games unfold in the same "world", with the latter being a spinoff of the former, developed by a completely different team. Read Only Memories is absolutely obnoxious about how it handles progressive themes; VA-11 HALL-A integrates them extremely well into the plot.

But I digress. I have zero time for people who object to games purely on the grounds that they contain "woke content". Particularly when the definition of "woke content", as defined by the Woke Content Detector group on Steam, is so broad. I invite you to take a look at their official spreadsheet of which games are and are not "woke" and have a good laugh at it, and we'll pick out some classics below.

Starfield

Here's a prime example of what this list is actually about: being sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic. I'm not sure much more needs to be said about this definition, other than to clarify for those who are somehow unfamiliar with Starfield that it is an open-structure role-playing game set in space, in which you play a self-insert character. Therefore having the option to select your name, gender, ethnicity and appearance makes a lot of sense. The implication of "many important people are [people of colour]" is that in The Future, we will have moved beyond white dominance and oppression of non-white people, but this is a bridge too far for the anti-woke crowd.

Civilization VI

This one is particularly hilarious. A game about running a civilisation on our planet, and considering important matters that both occurred in history and which might occur in the future is "woke" for acknowledging things like climate change. I guess we add "climate change denier" to the "sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic" list. Some racism and sexism on open display there, too.

BioShock Infinite

Another good one. The funny thing about this one is that they clearly got the point of BioShock, but then got offended by it.

Forza Horizon 5

I have to include this one just for how stupid it is. Forza Horizon 5, the game in which you spend your entire time in a car, is "woke" because it allows you to choose how the in-game characters refer to you. Because only big strong boys play car games, you know.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

This one is brilliant, because it's criticising the fact that the protagonist named in the game's title is "overshadowing" the character who is explicitly not the protagonist. Because he's black. Let's not beat around the bush here: this is racism. Again.

Disco Elysium

I'll take "I played Disco Elysium and didn't understand any of the big words" for 2,000, Alex. If you played Disco Elysium and didn't understand whether it was pro or anti communism, you don't deserve to be playing video games that have words in.

Final Fantasy VII

And I have to include this one just for the giggles. Final Fantasy VII features "subtly pro-climate action messaging". Yeah, Final Fantasy VII is real subtle about its environmental message, guys. Real subtle.

I'm utterly amazed at how committed these people are to being pathetic and weird. Because that is exactly what they're being. There are 386 entries on their "Recommended" (i.e. "not woke") list, while there are 746 "Not Recommended" ("WOKE!!!") titles and 299 "Informational" ("A BIT WOKE!!!") titles.

That's a thousand and forty-five games that these people will refuse to consider because they might be exposed to a black person, a gay person or, heaven forbid, a woman. There's no way you can look at that and not think it's utterly pathetic.

Unless you're one of them. In which case fuck off. I don't want to know you.

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The post #oneaday Day 93: The Truly Tragic Tale of the "Woke Content Detector" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The traditional media has its problems, of course, and it always has done. But there has always been a certain separation between editorial and commercial content — and when there isn't, it is clearly demarcated. There are no such demarcations when it comes to "influencer marketing" — and, from where I'm sitting, there appears to be absolutely zero scrutiny or oversight of how "influencers" are doing business, with minimal obligations for them to share the fact that they're being paid to say things.

The scourge of "influencers" is a universal one, but obviously my most direct experience with it is in the world of gaming. One of the most common criticisms thrown at old-school games journalists is that they've been "paid off" by publishers to do things a certain way — either to inflate a product's review scores above what it is perceived to "deserve", or perhaps to disparage rival products.

Having spent several years in the industry, I don't doubt that there have been occasions where that goes on. And there have been plenty of related incidents, too, with probably the most famous being "Gerstmanngate", where a writer was let go from Gamespot for giving a bad review to a game whose publisher had spent a considerable amount on advertising said game.

Most people would agree that a games journalist being in the pocket of a publisher is a bad thing. I don't believe it goes on nearly as often as the most insufferable people on the Internet think it does, but I think we can all agree that if money changes hands in this way, the "journalism" on the thing in question is compromised.

And yet the same people who would take a games journalist to task for accepting money from a publisher to cover a game are all over the world of "influencers", believing that having your face on YouTube makes you inherently more "real" and "trustworthy" than those people who hid behind all those pesky written words. And "influencers" (no, I'm not going to stop with the scare quotes, I fucking hate the term) are openly accepting paid promotional deals, then covering the products in question. Some of them remember to disclose this; not all do. But regardless of whether or not any disclosure is going on, how is that any fucking different?

I find it absolutely unfathomable that "influencers" accepting money for coverage of things is apparently just tickity-boo, whereas the exact same thing was one of the worst accusations you could throw at a games journalist. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I feel mostly immune to influencer marketing, but it's very clear that the younger generation in particular are very susceptible to it. And it's dystopian. It's horrible. And it's one of those things that we can't just "walk back" any more, because the influencer "industry" has become so massive over the course of the last decade or so.

I saw someone argue earlier that we're probably overdue for a brand new "segment" of the Internet, like how we once had stuff like Telnet and Gopher alongside the World Wide Web. If the Web has become this utterly devastated late-stage capitalism wasteland, perhaps it's time for people to move on to something else? And no, not the fucking Metaverse. Honestly, at this point, I'd welcome the ability to engage with a fully text-based Internet that wasn't 99% controlled by advertisers. Then we can leave all the "influencers" and their mindless zombie followers to it, and build something better elsewhere.

And then wait for that to be ruined. Still, it might be fun for a few years at least, before the Brands find it.

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The post #oneaday Day 89: Under the influence appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To be perfectly honest, I've never been on board with social media marketing from a consumer's perspective. Facebook went from being tolerable to almost unusable once The Brands arrived, and it's only gotten worse year after year. And back when I was an active user of Twitter, I not only didn't follow any Brands, I actively went out of my way to block any that ended up in my feed through "promoted" tweets or whatever.

Y'see, I've always had the somewhat controversial viewpoint that social media is best used for socialising. I used to actually quite enjoy using Facebook when it was a place to interact with friends. Likewise Twitter used to be a ton of fun when it was just people hanging out and shooting the breeze. But today? Both of those platforms are nigh-unusable for different reasons. And with people jumping ship from both, I struggle to see how their usefulness as marketing tools can continue.

This comes particularly to mind after the recent news that the "live service" game Concord has taken the unprecedented step of not only ceasing its online features, but actively refunding anyone who bought the game just 11 days after it hit store shelves. The writing was already on the wall for it; reports shortly after its launch suggested it had made "just" $1 million and only about 25,000 sales; these might seem like big numbers, but they really aren't in today's gaming industry, particularly towards the big-budget end of things, which is the space Concord occupies.

This occurrence got me thinking: how much of Concord's disastrous launch was down to the troubled landscape of social media today? A few years back, a big game launch like this would be accompanied by a frenzied Twitter campaign in an attempt to drive "organic" (ugh) word-of-mouth promotion. To put it in non-marketing speak, the game itself would post something on social media, then other people would share it, gradually spreading word of the game through shares, replies and retweets.

Today, we live in a world where Twitter is fast becoming a dirty word, as Elon Musk's "X", as Twitter is now known, is increasingly becoming prone to the "Nazi Bar Problem", since his constant bleating about "free speech" and "wokeness" has meant pretty much the only people left there now are some of the absolute worst dregs of humanity imaginable. It's no longer fun or useful to the vast majority of people who used to hang out there, so a lot of people have jumped ship — either abandoning social media entirely, or moving to alternative platforms such as BlueSky. So one has to wonder how much value there is in marketing to what is rapidly looking like a room full of Nazis.

The same can often feel like it's true of other platforms that are less of a "problem". I talked recently about the issues we had attempting to enforce rules more specifically on a Discord I help manage, and it's hard not to think about that "Nazi Bar Problem". We don't have a problem with "Nazis" as such (the few who have shown inclinations in that vague direction have been shown the door) but there are a few people who have become so entrenched that they're a problem… and it's honestly making us wonder if the time, effort and mental health expended on said server is worth it.

Can a product or Brand survive without social media? The assumption has always been "no", but like I said above, I've found myself actively repulsed by Brand presences on social media for the most part, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Sure, there are some Brand accounts that post interesting things — and the one I'm in charge of I try and make an effort to use in such a manner — but are they really adding any value?

I'm not convinced they are. We are living in a peculiar time, and I don't think anyone quite knows what's going to happen next.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 88: Is social media marketing over? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In this regard, I'd particularly like to throw some love (and some links to their YouTube channels) at, in no particular order and off the top of my head, RoseTintedSpectrum, WhatHoSnorkers, Timberwolf, Gouldfish on Games, Dudley of Yesterzine, Kim Justice, Slopes Game Room, Digitiser, More Fun Making It, Beyond the Scanlines, Gears of Games, Yawning Angel and doubtless myriad others that I'm forgetting. All of these folks are thoroughly lovely, supportive people that I am happy to have had direct contact with to varying degrees at various points over the course of the last few years. Click those links and subscribe to all of them. They do amazing work.

Sadly, there's a really unpleasant underbelly to the retro gaming community in the UK, and a lot of it centres around an individual known variously as "George Bum", "George Cropper" (not his real name), "Funky Spectrum" and any number of other aliases. "George" is a serial harasser who has been thrown off YouTube for his behaviour, and now festers in his own filth on his own little website (which, no, I'm not linking to), surrounded by chirruping sycophants who hang on his every shit-encrusted word — many of whom are very much old enough to know better.

I'm not pulling any punches here: "George" is an absolutely vile human being, and the way he has picked on several members of the retro gaming community for years at this point without any sort of punishment is utterly repugnant. He has particularly targeted the YouTuber Octavius with stalker-like obsessiveness, and is almost as bad with his fixation on Peter "Nostalgia Nerd" Leigh and his Norwich-based vegan bar-cum-arcade Barcadia. Most recently, he's had Kim Justice in his sights, because he thinks her well-researched book is not as good as his AI-generated drivel that he listed on Amazon for £250.

And yet no-one does anything about him. Because there's not really anything that can be done about this festering waste of space any more.

He's in his element on the Twitter of 2024, which is a disgusting sinkhole full of the absolute worst people on the entire Internet — many of whom are openly spouting their garbage under their real names — although I take some small comfort from the fact that anyone with any sense has abandoned the platform long ago.

He's been banned from YouTube for his harassment videos. (Of course, he maintains he did "nothing wrong".) Now, at least, he's confined to his stupid website. Sadly, as it's self-hosted I suspect there's not much anyone can really do about him short of actually raising a legal objection to some of the things he posts on there. And I doubt anyone wants to go through the time, energy and expense involved in doing that.

Which sucks, really, because it means this festering boil on the arse of UK retrogaming will never truly get lanced. All I can really do is encourage anyone reading this to never go anywhere near him. He is Bad News.

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The post #oneaday Day 87: The most toxic person in retro gaming appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Here's one:

And another:

Here's a brand new one with no views:

And here is part of what is apparently a whole series of the bloody things:

What these videos inevitably go on to describe is something that is emphatically not weird, usually rather mundane and which could have probably been better served with a more descriptive title.

At this point I'm sure someone desperately wants to bring up the American left-wing tendency to refer to anyone on the right of them as "weird", which is a current trend in the run up to the next U.S. presidential election. This is a separate issue — and one which, I have to say, I'm kind of on board with, because nothing shuts down a raging idiot like telling them they're being weird and making an idiot out of themselves — so I am not including it in the trend I am describing above, which has been around a lot longer.

I often find that the "[x] is weird" trend goes hand in hand with the tendency for Certain Types of People (again, not necessarily age-specific, but a definite type) to write things all in lower-case. You can see this in the first video example above. Nothing in the video title or the text on the thumbnail uses a capital letter, even when one is really needed (such as in the word "I", on the name "Tony Hawk" and the abbreviation "THPS" for "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater"). And, again, the people who do this sort of thing often like to make out that exceedingly mundane things are somehow outlandishly remarkable.

I'm not even entirely sure why this bothers me so much. I think it's that "[x] is weird" does the video (it's usually a video), the subject matter the video is covering and the creator of the video a disservice. I'm sure many of these "[x] is weird" videos are actually quite interesting, but I am, at this point, completely put off from clicking on them almost as much as if I see "I played 100 days of [game]".

I guess it's just another example of Stuff That Isn't For Me. And judging by the viewing figures on a couple of those videos I posted above, it seems I'm in a bit of a minority. But still. If you ever catch me posting a video with the name "[game name] is WEIRD" you have full permission to slap me. Even if I'm covering a French home computer game from the early '90s. Now those really WERE weird.

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The post #oneaday Day 85: Find another word than "weird" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm prompted to talk about this as a result of the thoroughly lovely RoseTintedSpectrum's recent video on the first series of beloved video game TV show GamesMaster, which, to put it mildly, has been doing numbers since he released it. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend giving it a look:

What we've all been noticing since the video started blowing up, however, is how much more frequent comments from complete arseholes become once you cross a particular popularity threshold. Not necessarily comments that are being directly insulting to the video maker, but comments from people who are just being dickish. People who use terms like "woketard". People who think the '90s was a utopia where white people flourished and you never, ever had to look at those filthy Muslims. You know the sort of people. The same sort of people who cry "DEI" anyone someone with a slight tan appears on screen.

When this first started happening, we were discussing the phenomenon in a Discord server that hosts a number of UK-based retro gaming and retro tech YouTubers, and we all had similar stories to share. There comes a point, it seems, usually after you cross the 1,000 views mark, where there's a marked uptick in comments from twats.

It makes sense when you think about it. A video blowing up and getting a lot of views means that it's being pushed by the ever-mysterious YouTube Algorithm to people beyond your usual audience and subscriber base, which means people from circles you might not normally mix (or want to associate) with may start stopping by. And boy, do they love to hear themselves talk.

I had something similar a while back when I had my own video "blow up". It was this one, a video I'm still pretty pleased with, but which left me feeling well and truly vindicated in just making videos about what pleases me, rather than what is guaranteed to be "popular".

Because what no-one tells you about getting popular and suddenly attracting all these complete penii is that it's genuinely stressful and often quite upsetting. I got to a point where I had to "pause" comments on the video above because the influx of them was stressing me out so much. And I wasn't even getting nearly as many dickheads as Rosie is getting on his video. It was just overwhelming, and not in a good way; I did not like it at all.

The same is true for anything tangentially related to social media or online presence. Post something — be it picture, video, blog post, article, whatever — that manages to get a significant reach, and it's seemingly inevitable that you'll have to deal with dickheads. This is, of course, frustrating, because one would hope that it's possible to get a significant reach on something without attracting the very dregs of Internet society, but with every "success story" like the ones I've described above, it seems increasingly inevitable that the dickheads? Oh they will come. They will come in droves.

I wonder how many people have been put off from a potential career of making creative things online by this sort of thing. I guess after a certain point you start to get used to it and be able to tune things out — and once you reach a certain size as an online personality, you can start hiring staff to take care of things like the comments section for you, so you can focus exclusively on actually making the videos.

But for everyone who gets to the point where they're able to hire a staff, I'm sure there are myriad more who gave up the first time they saw mild success, because the dickheads came. And I can't help thinking that's a real shame. Online culture shouldn't have come to this. But it has, and we just have to live with it, it seems, because no-one seems in a particular hurry to do anything about it.

Thank heavens for YouTube's "Hide user from channel" setting, at least, which means the dickhead of your choice is banished to the abyss; you'll never see them in your comments section again, and neither will the rest of your audience — but, here's the fun bit: they're still able to rage impotently at you, never knowing that you've effectively "blocked" them because YouTube doesn't tell them that.

This is the one bit of YouTube I can honestly say is absolutely masterful. There are few things better than knowing that there are dickheads who think they're posting amazing putdowns of your latest work, only for their comments to be silently banished to the abyss before they get anywhere near you.

Anyway, the Internet sucks, but go subscribe to Rosie 'cause he makes good vids. Ta-ra.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 59: Popularity produces pricks appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's hard to understand quite how outrage over the murders has escalated to what it is, but it's fair to say that things have gotten A Bit Racist, to say the least. Last I heard of the situation, a Holiday Inn Express that was supposedly housing immigrants — immigrants completely unrelated to the murders, I might add — was besieged by exactly the sort of people you're probably picturing when talking about people who are A Bit Racist Against Immigrants.

I won't dwell on the situation because I haven't read up much on it, so I'll refrain from commenting further about specifics. But it's brought something into focus for me which is a tad worrying: the fact that despite how we're supposedly a lot more tolerant, progressive and understanding these days, as a society, a lot more of this horrible shit appears to be happening.

Whether it's racist riots against people who had nothing to do with a horrible crime, transphobia at the Olympics (against someone who isn't actually trans) or just general foul behaviour and intolerance, we seem to have hit something of a bump in the road in attempting to create a 21st century utopia.

Who am I kidding; we absolutely were not on the road to a utopia. Everything has been going to shit for a while, so it's perhaps not altogether surprising that people are starting to act up, even if their behaviour and attitudes are completely misdirected. So I have to ask myself: was ignorance actually bliss?

I think back to my time living through the '80s, '90s and '00s and I don't remember ever feeling the sense of existential anxiety and dread over the world that I do these days. It's entirely possible that this was entirely due to our collective ignorance of various groups of people who were downtrodden and oppressed, which of course carries its own problems, but I don't remember encountering anywhere near the sort of outright hatred that is expressed today towards certain groups.

And it wasn't as if we weren't aware of the people who come in for the brunt of the abuse today. I just legitimately don't remember the hatred being anywhere near as vicious as it is today.

At least some of that is down to social media, of course. It's entirely possible that hatred like this was going on, but no-one saw it because not everyone had the means to plaster all their odious beliefs over every available space online. There was no "collective public space" like Twitter once was (and I don't think it is that any more, since a significant portion of people have abandoned it completely, and the most active of those remaining tend to veer fairly hard right) and so people tended to stick to their own communities.

On the one hand, that probably allowed hate groups to thrive in private; on the other, well, you can see the result of everyone being thrown together just from a casual glance at Twitter on any given day. It's not pretty.

Part of the existential anxiety and dread I feel over this whole situation is whether or not I "should" be doing something more, or even if that's possible. I've always settled for some variation of "treat others as you would like to be treated", and even take that as far as not commenting mean things on YouTube videos I really dislike (because I hate it when I get horrible comments). But is that really enough today? And if not, what can one do, other than simply actively not be a racist transphobic shit, and not go deliberately seeking fights?

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The post #oneaday Day 58: Was Ignorance Bliss? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One thing I'm going to try and make an effort to do is not look at "online" stuff as much as humanly possible. I'm not going to look at Twitter (easy, since I don't have an account any more except the official one I use for work), I'm not going to look at Facebook (ditto), I'm not going to look at BlueSky (easy enough) and I'm probably going to try and ration my Discord usage as much as possible also.

I just don't want to know, you see. I don't want or need to know what people are arguing about today, or what the worst people on the Internet are being sexist, racist or transphobic about today. I don't want to know about the seemingly endless parade of layoffs in the games industry. And I don't want to know how shit online media in general is. I know all these things. They are not going to change.

Instead, I would like a nice, quiet week off, away from it all as much as possible. This will demand a certain amount of willpower, of course, but I'm confident I can find enough things to occupy myself with that I won't need to idly flip through social-related apps on my phone. I have games to play, books to read, episodes of Deep Space Nine to watch, music to play, videos to make and all manner of other things. So why should I waste my time with stuff that, on balance, makes me miserable?

I shouldn't, obviously. So that's the plan. Minimise looking at anything potentially upsetting, frustrating or annoying online and just enjoy the things I have around me. I will, of course, still be checking in here and those videos I'm making will be up on YouTube, but aside from that… a bit of "digital detox" is just what the doctor ordered for a week. I hope it leaves me feeling refreshed, because heaven knows I feel run-down right now.

Time for the first sleep of the holiday, then. Bring on the aircon!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 56: Disconnect appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To put this in context, prior to joining this Discord, and for quite some time, my YouTube channel looked something like this:

I don't dislike this look. I was rather fond of how each "series" I was doing had its own distinct appearance, and I feel each thumbnail got nicely to the point: telling viewers that it was a video about a particular game on a particular platform.

But that's not really how YouTube works. However nice it looks to have a lineup of games with lovely consistent thumbnails Criterion Collection-style, it doesn't necessarily bring the views in. And so, with the advice and encouragement of the folks in the aforementioned Discord, I do things a little bit differently now.

This is how my channel looks today:

I'm pleased with this. Because I feel like these thumbnails do a much better job of intriguing and attracting the viewer's attention without assuming knowledge — i.e. "what is 'Atari A to Z'?" — while still allowing me a certain degree of consistency and coherence that makes my work immediately identifiable if you know what to look for.

Best of all, I haven't resorted to any of the more flagrantly transparent "clickbait" techniques, and "YouTube Face" is nowhere to be seen. The videos I make on YouTube are not for the same audience as Mr. Beast, so I make zero effort to court the sort of people who respond to those sorts of thumbnails.

And it works. At least I think so. Some of my videos perform about as well as what I considered a "solid performance" two or three years ago — that is to say, breaking three figures in the view count — but quite a lot more of them exceed that by two, three or even four times. And I've had a few breakout successes: my Super Woden GP 2 video sits at 86K views to date, my look at Ultima love letter Moonring has 21K views to date (and a very long tail), my video covering the announcement of The400 Mini attracted 14K views, and most recently a video on Project Gotham Racing 3 brought in a relatively modest but still impressive-for-my-channel 2.5K pairs of eyes.

I don't do this for the views, as I quite frequently state; I do it because I enjoy it. But I won't pretend it's not nice when a video does well — at least partly because it results in a bit of pocket money for me. That Super Woden GP 2 video made me over a hundred quid within a few days of it being posted. And now I get a small payout from YouTube earnings (i.e. the minimum payment threshold) every couple of months, whereas once it was a far-off goal I thought I'd never achieve. That's nice.

The secret behind those thumbnails? It's not really anything complicated. The most effective advice from the Discord I've followed is to keep text to just a few bold words, and present those words using at least two of the following: a bold outline around the letters; a bold drop shadow; and slightly rotating various parts of the complete text so that the eye is drawn to lines that aren't quite "straight". That's about it. I don't overuse colour; I don't overdo the "big red arrow" or "circling the obvious thing" tricks (although I put in a big red arrow occasionally as an in-joke to the group, which refers to itself as the "Big Red Arrow Club"); and, as noted, I don't do the "YouTube Face".

It works for me. The result is a channel full of videos I'm proud to call my own, and which a gradually (very gradually) growing number of people are coming to appreciate. That's pleasing to me.

YouTube and YouTube culture has myriad problems, but it's still the best place to create and share stuff like this. It's a valuable means of self-expression and sharing one's interests, and it's something I'm glad I decided to get stuck into exploring properly.

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The post #oneaday Day 51: The Art of the Thumbnail appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I don't always mean literally, as in "let's not talk about this any more", but I tend to find that a negative opinion about something almost certainly stops people from wanting to pipe up and say "actually, I liked it", because these days that often seems to lead to an unnecessarily heated argument. Both sides become entrenched in their respective positions, and both inevitably come out of the encounter feeling worse about the other person.

I know. I have been there on a frustrating number of occasions. There are Discord servers that I have come to feel less than welcome in because I liked something that someone with a louder voice than me didn't. And I feel it's genuinely quite hard to find a place where you can just go and be enthusiastic about something any more, without some killjoy jumping in and rattling off a laundry list of its "flaws". And the negative one always seems to come off better than someone who feels positively about something — even when the positive one clearly knows a lot more about the thing in question.

Once someone has opened that initial negativity valve, one of two things tends to happen: 1) the conversation ends, with the positive person left feeling like they can no longer talk about something they like, or 2) other people, some of whom have no experience with the thing under discussion, feel emboldened to jump on board with the person being negative, leaving the positive person feeling like they're being ganged up on.

There are responses to this, and I've heard them all.

"If you really love something, you criticise it." That may be true, but "criticising it" is not the same as shitting all over it and, in some cases, casting aspersions on those who do like it.

"Stop being so defensive." I am defensive because you are attacking something that is important to me.

"People are allowed to have different opinions." If that is the case, why do I now feel like I cannot open my mouth and express my support for the thing that "the room" has now decided is "bad"?

"Stop playing the victim." I'm sorry, but after probably over a decade of this at this point — of feeling like I have no place to really "belong" — I feel somewhat hard done by.

More than anything, though, it's just boring. I know we can all have a good laugh at the creative ways in which people talk about things they dislike — it's a lot harder to be "amusing" when you're being positive, it seems — but when no-one seems to like anything any more, it becomes extremely tiresome.

I'm not saying no-one is allowed to dislike things. I'm not saying no-one is allowed to hate things with the burning passion of a thousand fiery suns. I'm saying I wish people would just be a little more considerate of those who like things, and want nothing more than to be able to talk about the things they like with other people.

Someone liking or loving something is an opportunity to learn and grow. Even if you end up not feeling the same way about the thing in question, you can learn something about the person you were talking to, and why the thing might be important to them. Meanwhile, if you close them down by saying you hate the thing before they've even had a chance to express themselves fully, that's a potential relationship that is never going to go anywhere.

I feel bad that I even have to justify this. But with every passing day, I feel more and more alienated from people who should, in theory, be my friends, based on our shared interests. But when I'm confronted with negativity, I don't feel welcome. I don't feel like anyone wants to understand me. And I don't feel like anyone wants to be my friend.

That's a really shitty way to be feeling, let me tell you. And I hope it never happens to you.

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The post #oneaday Day 49: No Hate appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, a member of a Discord I'm in posted a link to the following tweet:

The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text "This content is no longer available." to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.

I tried it.

Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.

I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this "story", including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom's Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words "This content is no longer available." in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.

No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling "Retweets" this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.

Now, I don't blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don't even blame the original Tweeter, because it's entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.

Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.

Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It's not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as "news" without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.

Sadly, this is what "news" is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn't matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn't matter if anyone twigs that it's bollocks or not.

In some respects, I'm sad that I'm no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I'd likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.

I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I'd find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn't have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.

Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.

If you're looking for the Web as it once was, then I'm sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.

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The post #oneaday Day 32: Lies, Damned Lies appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There are a few practical examples I'd like to give. First is a YouTube channel I was introduced to recently called Obscurest Vinyl. This channel is run by a designer and musician who found some joy in creating fake record sleeves for songs with names you definitely wouldn't have gotten away with in the eras they're parodying. Songs like the wonderful Pullin' Out My Pubes (She Loves Me Not) by The Sticky Sweethearts:

You'll notice from that video that the record label now has some music attached to it. I was initially a little perturbed to discover that the person behind the Obscurest Vinyl YouTube channel had been using AI music generation to create the tracks, though my mind was set somewhat at rest by how he had written the lyrics (which are generally far too offensive to be the product of the typically rather po-faced Large Language Model AI bots) and tinkered with the initial output to make it flow properly, incorporate all the filthy language and sound consistent with the other works from the same fictional "artists" on the channel.

Of course, what the YouTube algorithm then did was go "oh, you watched a video about a fake record with lyrics about someone gluing their balls to their butthole, HERE, HAVE A MILLION MORE OF THEM". And it became very apparent that Obscurest Vinyl has a lot of copycats out there, none of which have anywhere near the same magic; these other channels are just trying to ride a trend.

This, of course, is symptomatic of one of the main things that is killing the Web right now: excessive Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Have you ever searched for some information on something, only to find a billion unrelated websites all magically having articles headlined "What Time Is The Superbowl On?" or "Where Do You Unlock Pictomancer in Final Fantasy XIV?" That's SEO at work, and that's a problem that is only getting worse with the amount of AI sludge that is being fed into the Internet at large. Sites want quick and easy clicks, so they look at what people are searching for — the trends of the hour — then provide a hyper-specific article about the thing.

Helpful? Arguable. I hate it, because I'd rather have the information directly from the original source — in the latter case above, for example, it took me a fair bit of scrolling before I got past all the websites jockeying for SEO juice to the actual website for Final Fantasy XIV, the thing I was looking for.

More than being frustrating if you want the information straight from the horse's mouth, it just makes the Web boring as fuck, because every site (including a lot that should really know better) are doing the exact same thing. Daily Wordle solutions. Individual articles for things that would have been much better incorporated into an FAQ. Outright copying and plagiarism of other sites. It really is a shame to see what online media has become — and frustrating to see that certain portions of the creative types on sites such as YouTube are more obsessed in chasing trends with transparently copycat material rather than, you know, being creative.

I don't know what the endgame of all this is. I hope we're in a "things will get worse before they get better" kind of situation, but honestly right now, it feels unlikely that the "get better" part will happen. The Web gets demonstrably worse, less useful and less fun day by day. And we've all let it happen. I don't know if we can undo that.

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The post #oneaday Day 22: Trends Have Made the Internet Boring appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

People who grew up pre-Internet doubtless all have their own experiences to share. The listener who wrote in with the question described how while they did spend time with their computer playing games, they also played outside, rode their BMX bike and all manner of other things, while both Neil and Dave described their own experiences as being a bit different, both from one another and from the listener's recollection. So I thought I'd share my own experiences, with the benefit of hindsight.

I grew up in a country village that, at the time I lived there, had somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people living there. It was seven miles away from the nearest town, there was no bus service unless you went to the next village over (and even then, it was pretty much a "once a week" sort of affair) and… I guess you could look upon it as either being ideal or terrible for growing up in. Ideal because it was quiet, safe and full of places to go on childish "adventures"; terrible because, particularly once I reached adolescence, all of my friends were a car journey away.

I went back and forth on my feelings about living in that village. When I was of primary school age, I attended the village school, and as such my social circle was pretty much all people who lived nearby. I had a small group of friends, only one or two of whom I actually went to see outside of school time, but mostly kept myself to myself. In retrospect, my relative lack of socialisation compared to some of my peers was likely down to the social anxiety I felt as a result of my then-undiagnosed autistic spectrum condition.

But at the time, I didn't really begrudge living in the village. I knew it was a nice place, that I lived in a nice house with supportive parents and a stable home life. I enjoyed when my grandparents came to visit and we'd go for a walk, inevitably to landmarks around the village that had acquired nicknames; "The Kissing Gate" (one of those awkward gates into a farmer's field), "The Brook" (a pathetic little stream that, these days, has mostly dried up and smells awful), "The Bullocks" (the farmer's field beyond The Kissing Gate that sometimes, but not always, had bulls in it). Looking back on it now, I have lots of fond memories.

When I entered my teens and started attending school in the aforementioned town seven miles away, my feelings changed a bit. While I was still somewhat anxious about social situations, I started to feel a bit more left out. As I grew older, I started to feel like there were lots of things that I couldn't do because I didn't live close enough. These feelings persisted until I turned 17, passed my driving test and suddenly had a lot more independence… so long as my Mum didn't mind me borrowing her car of an evening.

I promise I'm getting to the video games.

Point is, I don't remember spending a lot of time as a kid or a teen "playing outside". I didn't learn to ride a bike until well after many of my peers — memorably, I suffered a rather large setback on my initial efforts when I came a cropper and skidded along a rough concrete farm road, shearing a significant chunk of skin off my legs and arms, which made me a little hesitant to try again for a while — and I didn't spend much time with many of my peers, except on rare occasions when I'd go over to a friend's house for one reason or another.

Throughout all that time, I was fascinated with computers. Not just games, but computers in general. I knew my Dad worked for IBM, but didn't really know what he actually did (and still to this day don't think I could actually tell you). I knew my brother and Dad both contributed to an Atari computer magazine that we got regularly known as Page 6. And I knew all of my family, at one point or another, were keen computer users for various reasons. My Dad used it for "serious" software and subLOGIC's Flight Simulator II (which he insisted was "not a game" and was thus still counted under the "serious software" category"); my Mum liked the occasional blast on Millipede and Space Invaders; my brother was the one who was into games, though he had a much more active social life than I did, helped at least partly by being ten years my senior.

Since I determined quite early on that I rather enjoyed — or at least felt most comfortable — in solitude, I was grateful for the company of the computers of our household: initially the Atari 8-bit and ST, then later the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95/98 PCs. In the early days of the Atari 8-bit, I devoured books and magazines about the computer, typing in listings and learning how to program in BASIC myself. I never really got what I'd call good at it, but I developed a basic (no pun intended) competence that was greater than that of someone who just used their computer to play games.

But I also played games. A lot of games. I learned a lot from those games, too. Text adventures helped me with my reading (and, indirectly, my writing); keyboard-based games played a significant role in developing the typing skills I still have to this day; puzzle games helped me with my general intelligence and problem-solving; action games helped me develop my imagination and my motor skills.

It's stereotypical to say that "games help with hand-eye coordination", but I was diagnosed dyspraxic in primary school, which basically meant I was a bit clumsy with certain things; video games helped me feel like I was competent at something, even if I was unable to hold a pencil "properly". Playing games, and more broadly "going on the computer", was important to me. It felt like it was something I could enjoy without compromise; I didn't feel like I had to make any sort of adjustments, or have people "go easy on me" as I did in activities like sports. It was just something for me to enjoy. And, as I moved into my teens and broadened my circle of friends at secondary school, they proved to be a good backdrop for social interactions, too.

More often than not, if I went over to a friend's house or had a friend over to mine, we would spend our time playing games together, or at the very least just using the computer. I have fond memories of spending time with several friends just messing around with speech synthesis programs on the Atari ST and Amiga, and even programming in STOS, a dialect of BASIC for the Atari ST, or making silly in-joke games with Clickteam's wonderful Klik and Play and The Games Factory. I was happy that my formerly solitary activity was something I could share my enjoyment of with others.

This continued as I came to the end of my time at school and moved into university. I made new friends, at least partly through computing and video games, and many of those folks are people I still make an effort to spend time with today — even if sometimes that effort doesn't feel like it's reciprocated with quite the same enthusiasm. Computing and gaming remained something that was important to me, even as the Internet came into its mainstream ascendancy in the late 1990s.

I have some fond memories of those early days of the Internet. Chatting with strangers on CompuServe's "CB Simulator", aka just a public chatroom. Posting messages on CompuServe's GAMERS forum, which eventually let to me earning $200 for making ten Wolfenstein 3-D levels that were included in an official expansion pack. Chatting with my friends from my course on MSN Messenger. Randomly getting into a conversation with a young woman on AOL Instant Messenger, only to discover that, completely by chance, she was the housemate of one of my existing friends.

Computing was always there as part of my life, but I think a key difference between then and now is that in my formative years, it was there as a backdrop to socialisation, rather than the means of socialisation itself. The This Week in Retro listener commented that their children feel genuine anxiety and FOMO ("Fear Of Missing Out") if they have gaming time privileges revoked for whatever reason, because rather than Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft being the backdrop for their socialisation, those activities are the socialisation.

There's also social media to take into account. I am genuinely glad that social media did not exist when I was a child, because I'm not sure I would have made it through my adolescence intact. Sure, there are positive aspects to it, such as being able to reconnect with people you haven't spoken to for a long time, but there's also the insidiously manipulative nature of all the major platforms today, and how none of them are really concerned with being a platform for communication; they are, instead, platforms for advertising.

The thing that really makes me feel like social media may well have done me in, though, is how easy it is for it to be used for bullying. I suffered a fairly significant amount of bullying throughout both my primary and secondary school life, and it was hell. It left me wary of trusting people; it made me frustrated about communicating with others; it made me feel like it was, at times, simply not worth making the effort to interact with people.

For a long time, I used to say that the Internet allowed me to "be myself" for the first time… well, ever, really. I could find like-minded people who understood me and respected me for who I was, and I felt like I was among friends. I don't feel that way any more; nowadays, I feel the same way about online interactions as I do about interacting with real strangers: genuine anxiety and fear. I dread getting notifications in apps or on websites where I've posted something publicly. And yet, I still do it — here I am, after all — because I feel like it's important to not let the bullies win, whether they're real or imagined. I need to feel like I can still express myself the way I want to express myself; to enthuse about the things I want to enthuse about. That's why I write here and on MoeGamer, and why I make videos over on my YouTube channel.

Even then, though, I feel a lot of frustration, because I know a significant portion of the world looks on the Internet, social media and general social interactions in a different way to me. That can often leave me feeling lonely and isolated. But the one thing I've always had as a constant is being able to immerse myself in a video game or other activity on the computer, and feel like I am, for once, at peace — even if, with each passing year, it feels like it's getting harder to share that haven of peace with others.

That went a tad deeper than I perhaps thought, and I'm not sure I have an answer to the original poster's questions or concerns. I do know, however, that spending time on the computer isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, particularly when it brings someone comfort and stability. It's when that "safe" activity starts to get "unsafe" things encroaching on it that you need to perhaps take action — but that's going to be something that is different for everyone. For me, it's meant largely removing myself from the public-facing part of the Internet except in places where I can very much control and curate my experience, and continuing to enjoy those things that I always have enjoyed in peace and quiet. No video game ever betrayed me, after all.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 16: The Youth of Yesterday appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Confused, I asked for more details, since I wasn't aware I'd been doing anything of the sort, and it transpired that he somehow thought I ran the Twitter account for a certain website that I'm not going to name for reasons that will probably become obvious. (It's not Rice Digital, the site I used to be in charge of, before you wonder!) I explained that no, that was nothing to do with me, I had never written for that site and I wasn't even on Twitter any more, which I'm not.

Hopefully reassured, my acquaintance wished me well and that was the end of that.

He got me curious, though, so I went and looked at what the account in question had been posting, and it didn't take me long to stumble across what the issue was. It seems that the main problem stems from a story the site in question had recently posted that was, in essence, nothing but a rumour with sources that could be called questionable if one was being charitable, non-existent if one was being realistic. The thrust of the story was that it was one of many instances of a supposed conspiracy that "DEI" (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) consultants are destroying modern gaming.

I'll address some things up front, because I have spoken about these things in the past, often critically, and I want to make it clear what my own stance on the situation is.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are not bad things. Do some companies and individuals take things a little too far in terms of pussy-footing around protected groups in an attempt to not offend anyone? Absolutely, particularly in the corporate space. Have there been instances of games journalists slagging off games that they knew nothing about because there was sexually suggestive content in them? Most definitely. Both of those things are, I believe, still worthy of criticism. Any creative work deserves to have a fair shake at expressing what its creators want to express without interference, and without those engaging with it treating it in bad faith.

However, this current conspiracy theory — and make no mistake, it really is a conspiracy theory — goes a lot further than those things. The current belief is that a cadre of games journalists and diversity consultants are running an extortion racket on game developers and publishers in the name of making all the women ugly and not white. To these people, if this situation continues unchecked, all of gaming will be completely destroyed, because having the opportunity to select your pronouns in a first-person role-playing game where you play a self-insert avatar is somehow responsible for the complete downfall of western society. It'll turn all your kids into immigrant transgender gays, I tells ya.

This is, of course, complete bollocks. It is true that the triple-A space has been making some marked steps towards improving diversity in many of its games, but as I've argued numerous times both here and over on MoeGamer, the triple-A space is just a tiny piece of the complete behemoth that is the games industry. Just because some triple-A blockbuster game has a woman with "woke chin" (an actual quote from one of these nutcases, criticising the new Joanna Dark for having a wider chin than she used to) does not mean that games with anime titties are going anywhere. Right now, you can play Final Fantasy XIV as a bunnygirl with big tits running around in bra and pants if you want, and Steam is filled with games where you can fuck your aunt. Hell, there are physical releases of Switch games that feature uncensored jizz-filled vaginas. Jizz! In a Nintendo game! (Actually, don't, you'll need to do more than blow in the cartridge afterwards if you do.)

Here's the thing: diversity means that you end up with diverse things. Some of those things will appeal to you, personally, while others will not. Those things that do not appeal to you, personally, are not a personal affront to you. Consider something that you really really love, but which other people don't seem to get. Now contemplate someone with a completely different worldview to you — be it a differing political ideology, racial background, sexuality, gender identity or any of the myriad other distinguishing characteristics we all have — finding something that they really really love, but which you don't seem to get. It's the exact same situation, only you're seeing it from the other side. Neither of those things cancel out the other.

The longstanding concern that this conspiracy theory stems from is that the growth in progressivism in the games industry — and particularly in games journalism — is somehow going to be responsible for the death of games that push boundaries or cater specifically to those with particular tastes, especially if those tastes are "playing games with conventionally attractive female characters in them". Well, ten years on from the shitshow that was GamerGate, I think we can say pretty conclusively that this has not happened. If anything, we're far more likely to encounter boundary-pushing games today than we were ten years ago… arguably to a fault, in some situations, such as with the amount of AI-generated "Hentai"-labeled crap that infests both the Nintendo eShop and Steam.

What we have now is a landscape that has changed. Triple-A may well be taking aim at a more diverse market, and that's entirely understandable, because with budgets spiralling out of control and layoffs happening left, right and centre, those games have to appeal to the broadest demographic possible. And just because some set-in-his-ways white dude doesn't like that a new big-budget game has black/gay/transgender/[insert minority group of choice here] people in it doesn't mean that others won't like it. It makes the most sense for triple-A to try and include as many people as possible, because, cynically speaking, that's how you make the money.

But the thing to remember is that none of this is "taking your games away" or "killing gaming".

I will freely admit that, ten years ago, I had some serious concerns that the strong push for progressivism in games journalism in particular would push certain forms of interactive media underground or possibly even cause them to dry up altogether. I almost certainly made some ill-advised comments during that time which are likely still on this blog and MoeGamer somewhere — but I'll say now, in 2024, those fears some of us had ten years ago completely failed to materialise, and I'm not afraid to admit that I was wrong about those things.

Triple-A has changed, yes. But ten years ago I wasn't concerned about triple-A because I'd bounced hard off that part of the industry several years prior — and I still don't care about triple-A today. I was worried about the games I did enjoy, which were B-tier titles, primarily from Japanese developers and publishers, that had a laser focus on their target audience.

Despite never engaging with triple-A beyond games with "Final Fantasy" in the title, I have never been short of things to play. If anything, I have too many things to play, as my rapidly filling shelves will attest. If I threw triple-A in the mix, I'd really be overwhelmed.

There's no "great replacement" of video games. There's no "DEI" or "Modern Audiences" conspiracy to make every woman in gaming ugly. There's no "extortion racket" causing games journalists to circle the wagons and protect a firm of diversity consultants from the "true gamers".

There is, however, a problem with intolerance. And it seems to be getting worse, fuelled by conspiracy theories such as this. I've seen way more in the way of racism, homophobia and transphobia in Internet comments — particularly in busy, public places such as YouTube and what is left of the burning garbage fire that is Twitter — than ever before.

Just last week I watched an episode of the Game Grumps' spinoff show Ten Minute Power Hour, in which Arin and Dan got gussied up as drag queens with the assistance of a professional. While there were plenty of comments in support of the episode — particularly as it aired during Pride Month, which is ongoing as I type this — there was some serious ugliness further down in the comments below where the moderators had been doing the majority of their work.

I'd say I was kind of shocked, but I've seen this intolerance and outright hatred rising over the last few years, and it's not pretty at all. It was particularly shocking to see it in the comments of a Game Grumps video, though; while the Grumps have toned down some of the more colourful elements of their humour over the last 10+ years — no more "Sad Hoshi" in an exaggerated faux Japanese accent, for example — they certainly have not, in any way, abandoned who they are or the overall vibe their humour creates. What has changed, however, is how vocal the intolerant and hateful have become.

Browsing Twitter as I was earlier, I stumbled across an absolutely enormous thread by one fan of the website that started this whole discussion, collecting "evidence" of the supposed conspiracy — actually just screenshots of games journalists saying that maybe this website shouldn't report on stupid rumours without even attempting to verify them, or commenting in support of progressive talking points. As I scrolled through page after page of this guy collecting these tweets, all I could think of was the old wisdom that if more and more people seem to be against you, perhaps you are the one who actually has the problem.

Look, I have absolutely no time for the militant end of the left wing. I find them insufferable, tedious and just plain annoying. But I feel like I'm seeing a lot less of them these days; the problem we have right now is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. And it is a problem. When people like me, who have long made a specific effort to try and steer as clear as possible of anything even vaguely politically charged or controversial, are noticing an uptick in intolerance and hatred, there's definitely an intolerance and hatred problem.

It may be a cliché to say, but it sure would be nice if we could just all get along. We're talking about video games, after all.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 9: The Culture War is a Problem appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm sure discussing things with people online wasn't always as exhausting as it feels these days.

I have some extremely fond memories of time spent on 1up.com's forums and "club" pages talking about games with a varied crew of folk, all of whom had come together through our shared interest in the video game medium. We didn't always agree on things, but that made for interesting discussions as we strove to understand one another's viewpoints. There was no shaming, there was no telling each other we were wrong (apart from on one podcast, where a couple of participants got a little more heated than a reasonable person perhaps should over whether Fallout 3 was playable from the third-person camera) and there was just a nice atmosphere of mutual respect.

These days, it's becoming more and more of an effort to open my virtual mouth online in places supposedly made for "discussion", because to a disproportionately large number of people, "discuss" appears to mean "disagree vehemently and aggressively". And it's inevitably over something that simply doesn't matter, but the nature of such exchanges make it easy for hot heads to prevail and things to get stupidly, absurdly aggressive over an absolute nothing of a subject. (No, I'm not citing specific examples, for reasons that I hope are already obvious.)

This is a disappointing development to me, because 20 years ago, I would have sat here and quite confidently said that on the Internet, I could be my "real" self much more than I could be in "the real world". I actually do still feel that way to a certain extent — outlets such as this blog, MoeGamer and my YouTube channel allow me to express myself in the way I want to, rather than how I'm "supposed to" — but even in those places, there's always the risk of some weirdo turning up and getting weirdly angry about something which absolutely does not matter.

Thing is, I sort of get it. I get why those people exist, because there are times when I'll read something online and I'll feel my own heckles rising (you feel it start around the balls) and contemplate posting some sort of snippy remark in response. Most of the time, I've conditioned myself to not do that. Occasionally one slips through, and I pretty much always regret it, because it inevitably leads to a disproportionately furious argument over something I actually don't feel that strongly about, because the whole "sense of honour" thing kicks in and you want to save face, no matter the cost.

It's exhausting. It's exhausting when you get pulled into situations like this, and it's exhausting making an effort to avoid situations like this, because it's very easy to take things much too far and end up simply not wanting to talk to anyone. I have definitely reached that latter end of things, as there are times when I feel extremely lonely but unable to reach out to someone because I simply don't have the mental fortitude to be able to fully process how today's online interactions tend to work.

I think about this sort of thing quite a lot, and when I do, I always end up asking myself if it's really worse than it used to be, or if my perspective has just changed. And honestly, I'm not completely sure of the answer to that. I suspect it's a bit of both, because I know I have deliberately changed my online habits for the sake of a quiet life — but then I'll look at something like this legendary thread from Usenet circa 1997 and see that people getting really very cross about things that don't matter was still a thing back when I thought the Internet was much nicer.

I guess the difference is that there was a certain "barrier to entry" for the "tougher" parts of the Internet back then; I never went on Usenet, so I never saw any of that sort of thing. These days, that aggressive means of interacting with one another is just the norm; social media has become what Usenet was, only rather than being neatly segregated into interest groups, everyone has all been plunged into the same vat of boiling piss to fight it out among themselves and see who has the loudest voice. I'm aware that was an utterly tortuous metaphor but I don't care. My blog, my rules.

The other difference, of course, is that today I am aware of my own mental health conditions, including depressive and anxious episodes that occur sporadically, along with my underlying condition of Asperger's. Being aware of why I find certain things about socialising difficult is useful, but it can also make me feel more hesitant than I perhaps "should" be to engage with certain scenarios.

I don't really have a conclusion for all this; I just felt like thinking "out loud", as it were. And so there you have it. Now I'm off to go and eat chilli.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 3: Talking is Exhausting appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won't go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I've actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole "half a sentence" thumbnail format. I didn't click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go "[our brand] is _________" and expect people to "fill in the blank". And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn't matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That's all that mattered.

It's the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don't want to click on their videos because it's rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of "best moments" that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you've enjoyed a complete story by the time you've left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert's show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that's a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I'm writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we're learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it's still relatable to anyone either going through that "20s to 30s" part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don't really work as standalone "jokes" because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it's frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It's just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have "time" for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they're doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I'm aware there's nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it's exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.

The post The TikTokification of comedy appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A few years back — make that more like a decade or so at this point, I guess — I was someone who very much wanted to believe in my fellow man. I wanted to assume the best intentions, I didn't want to believe that people could be awful to one another more often than not, and I certainly didn't like seeing entire groups thrown under the bus based on their affiliation towards (or against) something that had little to do with their actual personality.

To give some specific examples: back in the early 2010s, when games journalists were starting to have harsh words to say towards video game enthusiasts when they complained about Mass Effect 3's disappointing ending, I had rather mixed feelings about the whole thing.

On the one hand, I understood why many folks found the way the trilogy wrapped up to be disappointing; on the other, I felt the only people who really had any say in how it concluded were the people who actually made it. And on the third mutant hand, I really wasn't happy with the way games journalists and press outlets seemingly gleefully jumped at the opportunity to attack the very audience they were supposed to be serving.

This may sound like fence-sitting, and perhaps it is, but I felt that everyone had valid points, and all of them were worth hearing out. I honestly believed that people could discuss something like this in good faith and not resort to attacking one another. To return to my original point: I wanted to believe in my fellow man, and that we could all reach an understanding.

Fast forward a couple of years from that and we have the notorious "Gamergate" controversy. Again, I'm not ashamed to say I had mixed feelings about the whole situation. Without a doubt, there were people who were using the background of what had been happening as an excuse to harass people — but to my eyes, there was an equal if not greater number of people who had genuine, worthwhile things that they wanted to say, and they wanted to be heard.

To see the entire group who gathered under that particular banner tarnished with the same "harassing women and minorities" brush was… disappointing, particularly when I saw this attitude from people I knew personally. Again, I'll reiterate: I wanted to see the best in my fellow man, and I honestly wanted to believe that the people who felt passionately enough about a particular issue to effectively become "activists" in an online sense were doing so for a good cause.

At the same time, I'll also add that I never planted my own flag beneath the Gamergate banner, because I also saw that it was very much on to a losing battle in terms of public perception. Regardless of how many people did have legitimate complaints, and the few good things that did come out of the movement, that scarlet letter of "harassing women and minorities" was always going to be there for anyone even tangentially involved.

Unfortunately, most of you probably know how these situations ended up.

In more recent years, I've seen countless more incidents that have played out exactly like the Mass Effect 3 controversy and Gamergate, and with every incident, I feel like I've lost a bit of that faith in my fellow man — to such an extent that now, I have precisely none of it left.

I have no confidence that anyone attempting to make a seemingly "passionate" argument is doing so for the greater good or for altruistic reasons. Because very few people these days show their true faces online. Very few people actually stand up for what they believe in; instead, they just jump on whatever the trending topic of the hour is and proceed to harass anyone who is seen as being "in the wrong" for whatever reason.

And it is harassment. This is another thing that I didn't want to believe while I still had some remaining faith in my fellow man.

I used to believe that people wouldn't be so awful as to hound others over a single issue, to such an extent that it has a severe impact on their own feelings of safety and wellbeing. I used to believe that people would say their piece and then give their "opponent" the opportunity to make a move, to make things right, or to at the very least explain themselves.

After multiple instances over the course of the last decade where I've seen that this emphatically isn't the case — both involving me and incidents that I've just observed from outside — my only possible conclusion is simple. I was wrong to have faith in my fellow man. I was wrong to ever believe that people can be "good" to one another. I was wrong to believe that we can ever resolve our differences like decent… well, like decent human beings.

The default state for people to interact with one another these days, both on and offline, is aggressive, hostile and confrontational. The other person is always in the wrong, and it always has to be a fight. And you know what? I'm really tired.

I don't want to fight. Ever. I'm not one of those people who is "up for a good argument", and I never have been. I used to cry more than my parents when they had perfectly normal married couple arguments when I was a kid. If someone's rude to me, I end up thinking about it for the rest of the day (and sometimes longer) to such a degree that it ruins anything else I had to do. And, as someone who is already anxious about social interactions at the best of times, I never walk into a situation thinking "I'm going to start some shit".

Apparently this is no longer a "normal" way to be, however. And thus I cannot help but just sit here and be disappointed in that fellow man I once believed so vehemently in. Is it really any wonder I have so much hesitance in meeting new people when my experiences would seem to indicate that there's at least an 80% probability any new person I meet will end up being a complete arsehole that I'll never be able to get rid of as they repeatedly harass me over some stupid shit like what brand of underpants I wear?

The one positive, I guess, is that this does at least make me appreciate the few good people I do still have in my life; the ones I know I can genuinely rely on, and who rather wisely have always managed to remain high above this stupid shit. So if you're one of those people, and if you're reading this it's likely that you are, thanks. Please don't change.

The post I don't blame anyone for being a misanthrope in this day and age. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Firstly, Elon Musk's idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It's both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say "lol, fuck Twitter".

Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn't really feel like it's… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.

Thirdly, I'm just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.

On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft's Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you're one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn't let you just play; instead, you're bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game "got good" later.

I think this is something worth talking about, because it's the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.

One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I'd said the exact opposite to what I'd actually written in the article. He'd obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who "liked" his dumbshit comment wouldn't go and check whether or not he was right.

I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he's too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?

And the answer to that is that I shouldn't care; I shouldn't let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.

On a related note, this news isn't finalised or official as yet, but it's pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional "content creation" (ugh) game completely.

I won't go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it's nothing anyone needs to worry about — I'm simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I'm incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my "audience", such as they are.

I'm both happy and sad about this. I'm happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself "having" to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother's footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.

Again, I won't go into details for now, as that's something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I'll say again, it's nothing to worry about — I'm proud of what I've worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else's.

I'm just tired. So very tired of "content creation" being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.

I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they're culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they're not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.

And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.

The trouble is, I've discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, "content" is piss in the wind. It's only relevant for the day it's posted — if you're lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it's fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I've seen on MoeGamer, you're literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)

Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual "guide" articles for things they don't care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn't have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don't give a toss as long as the numbers go up.

All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of "consuming content" rather than "reading interesting articles" and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.

It's demoralising and infuriating, and if you've been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.

And so that's what I'm doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I'll be a lot happier as a result, but I can't help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.

The post I finally nuked my Twitter account completely. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Let's address these one at a time, as each of them are symptomatic of something slightly different.

I Played 100 Days of Viral TikTok Recipes

As someone who does YouTube as a hobby, it's infuriating to see the supposed "professionals" fall into a rut of simply baiting The Algorithm with the exact same types of "content" all day, every day.

I Played 100 Days of [Game]. I Made Viral TikTok Recipes. This is the Worst [x] Ever. Thrifting with My Completely Charisma-Free Mom.

There's stuff on YouTube that I like and continue to watch. But this is the stuff that tends to languish in the wake of TOP CRINGE COMPILATIONS!! and FUNNIEST TIKTOKS I COULD FIND!! And this pisses me off. Because it demonstrates a complete and utter lack of creativity.

Yes, one could argue that there's at least some creativity at play in editing these videos and picking the material to use in them — but even then, they're incredibly predictable, regardless of who they are. You can expect to hear the Metal Gear alert noise, Kevin MacLeod's Local Forecast, that "anime oooooh" noise in a significant proportion of popular videos out there, and you'll see all the same visual tricks, too — jump cuts, crash zooms with a red tint on the screen and heavy screen shake, "A Few Moments Later" SpongeBob memes.

It's infuriating. Like, it makes me genuinely angry. I know it shouldn't. I know it's dumb to get angry at people following trends. But it really does make me legitimately furious.

Why? Because I know there are lots of people working their arses off to make quality YouTube videos (note: not "content") and getting very little reward, relatively speaking for doing so. Instead, the endless assembly line of identikit Content continues to churn, cluttering up everyone's YouTube feeds with worthless garbage that provides precisely 0% more cultural enrichment value than simply staring at the wall for 12 minutes.

It particularly sucks to see video makers I used to like resort to this sort of thing — but I guess if you're making a job out of it, it becomes an unfortunate necessity after a while. For every viewer like me who unsubscribes from a channel once it becomes a clickbait factory, it seems at least a hundred more take my place. So there's zero incentive to change.

The PS5 Pro's release date has NOT been "revealed"

Earlier today, Andie and I were talking about how long various consoles were on the market, and as part of this discussion we looked up the release dates of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, pondering if and when a PS6 might ever be a thing — and if it would have a disc drive, which was the main point of our conversation.

When Googling the latter case, I was promptly confronted by a wall of articles that claimed the PS5 Pro's release date had been "revealed".

Needless to say, it had not been revealed. Instead, what had happened was a single gaming site that no-one had ever heard of had claimed that "insider sources" (anonymous, of course) had "confirmed" the PS5 Pro was "in development" and would "probably" release in "late 2024". This had then been parroted pretty much verbatim (albeit with some variation in the supposedly "revealed" release date) by a variety of other gaming sites you've never heard of, and this had happened so much that Google had figured it was worth showing to anyone who was searching for a simple piece of information: the actual, real PS5's release date. You know, the one where a product that actually exists was actually released.

Essentially, what we ended up with was a page of search results that were nothing but speculation at best, outright lies at worst. And there will be no consequences whatsoever for any of the sites that were engaging in this behaviour; in fact, they will almost certainly have been rewarded with happy big traffic numbers, and you can bet those pages have ads coming out the wazoo on them, too.

As someone who, as a child, had aspirations of joining the games press, and hoped he would be able to do that more than pretty much anything in the world, this is heartbreaking to see. And it's doubly frustrating when I run a site on which our writers take pride in composing honest, thoughtful, well-researched pieces rather than simply rushing to jump on the latest trend in order to squeeze out another few cents of ad revenue.

How to find all the blue medallions in Resident Evil 4 Remake

Speaking of which, one trend which was just starting to take hold when I left USgamer in 2014 was the odious rise of "guide content". For the unfamiliar, this is an SEO-baiting tactic in which sites post individual articles that supposedly answer each and every possible question people on Google might have about anything vaguely relevant and popular.

It's a completely unsustainable approach to "content generation", particularly if you have any standards about the quality of the articles on your site whatsoever, and it means that, again, if you're searching for specific pieces of information, you have to wade through 500 sites that have clickbaited their way to the top of Google's search results, with no guarantee that their information is reliable or helpful.

I'll give you an example. Prior to picking up my PS5, I was curious how the "PS4 Boost" mode worked. This is where the PS5 is able to run certain appropriately updated PS4 games with better performance than the original PS4 (and in some cases, PS4 Pro) would have been capable of.

The things I were curious about were simple: did this work with all PS4 games, or just select ones, and did I have to do anything to make it work?

The answers to these questions, by the way, are "no" and "no".

While attempting to uncover these simple answers, I stumbled across a full-blown, surprisingly lengthy article entitled "How to Enable PS5 Game Boost". Please recall that the answer to the question "do you have to do anything to make Boost mode work?" is "no", and then marvel at the fact that multiple sites, not just the one I found, managed to spin this simple answer out into at least 600 words of complete garbage, because you need at least 600 words for SEO purposes, don't you know.

I'm so tired of this. To the layman, it might seem like it's very convenient. But as someone who has worked in the commercial press and now works on the more "indie" side of things, it's infuriating, because I know these articles do not exist out of a desire to be helpful. As with all other clickbait — because that's what these articles are — the aim is simple: gain traffic, and, by extension, ad revenue.

I'm so tired. So tired. The Internet was an exciting place when I was a kid and everyone was just getting to know it. Now, it's nothing more than a mindless, soulless content factory where everyone is bidding for your attention so they can inject yet more ads directly into your eyeballs.

There are little havens where this isn't the case, of course. But they become more and more difficult to find with each passing day. And it honestly worries me quite a bit.

But at this point, it's also hard to know what to do, if anything. If I criticise this sort of thing, no-one listens. (I'm writing this today largely to vent my own spleen rather than to convince anyone else.) If I give up and engage in it myself just to join the rat race, I'm part of the problem. And if I abandon the Internet entirely, I deprive myself of something that is still, in some ways, a useful resource — and in some other ways, an essential utility for modern life.

So I guess I'll keep doing what I always do. Do my own thing, occasionally complain about how much everything else sucks, then repeat until my inevitable death from a brain aneurysm.

The post I'm completely burnt out with the intellectually, creatively and morally bankrupt world of clickbait. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

People love to complain. This is a trait traditionally and historically associated with the British, but it's most definitely not an exclusively British thing. Perhaps it once was, but it most certainly isn't any more. And as with so many things, we can probably blame the way in which the Internet has brought people together — something which should, inherently, be a good thing, but which has somehow become corrupted along the way.

As I've noted elsewhere, I'm not spending a ton of time on Twitter any more due to a combination of the horrible atmosphere that seeps from every pore of that website and the constant ridiculous changes Elon Musk keeps making on a seemingly daily basis. But occasionally, I can't help myself from clicking on one of the Trends out of sheer curiosity.

The other day, I happened to see that Evri was trending. Evri, if you're unfamiliar, is the new name that the courier company formerly known as Hermes decided to adopt for themselves a while back. I don't know the reasons for the rebrand and honestly I really don't care, because they're inevitably absolute bullshit and everyone knows that Evri is "really" Hermes anyway, so it's largely irrelevant.

However, what I found when looking at the Evri trend was that everyone was complaining about Evri. Everyone had the same stories to tell of parcels being lobbed over their fence, of packages arriving broken or tampered with, or generally some tale of misfortune and woe related to getting their package delivered from this one specific carrier.

Here's the thing: I've never had a problem with Evri or Hermes. I spent a brief period working for them while I was looking for a proper job and I know what it's like "from the inside" also. While it was a time-consuming, underpaid and largely thankless task for the couriers, it was a reasonably well-run operation in general, and there were various ways in which said couriers were encouraged to do a good job, up to and including being "watched" through the scanny things they're supposed to carry around with them.

As fortune would have it, for some reason during my brief time with the company I never actually got a scanny thing, so I never had to worry about such things — not that I had anything to particularly worry about anyway. But I digress.

I'm not saying no-one has ever had a problem with Evri or Hermes. But if you were to look at that trend on Twitter, the conclusion it would be easy to come to would be that they were a company that should be absolutely, completely and without doubt avoided at all cost, because literally every delivery they do is the absolute worst possible thing that has ever happened to someone, and they have ruined too many Christmases and children's birthdays to count.

This is nonsense. While it's foolish to assume that they're completely without fault — in any sort of "gig economy" sort of situation, you have a risk of bad apples, but this is also true for more formally structured corporations — it's also ridiculous to put across the impression that they're a complete failure that should never be trusted.

It's just one of many examples of the Internet painting the worst possible picture of something. And I could provide plenty of other examples at this point, but I'll refrain from doing so for the sake of time.

What I will urge you to do, however, is that if you see any sort of seemingly universally negative reaction towards something — particularly on any sort of standards-free platform such as social media or user reviews — then be cautious. Chances are the thing that is being ranted and raved about is nowhere near as bad as people are trying to put across — because let's face it, people are a whole lot more likely to complain about something than post about how they had no problems whatsoever with a company or service.

Perhaps we should change our outlook on such things. Perhaps we should start posting positive comments when a company does the right thing and does what is expected of them. Or perhaps that's ridiculous — after all, a service that is being provided to you conforming to your exact expectations should not be particularly worthy of comment at all, because, well, it's what you expected.

But then that means the negativity will always win, because the complainers will always speak up, while the satisfied customers will just quietly get on with their day, thinking nothing more of the company they've interacted with or the service they've received.

Perhaps the answer is just not to listen to anyone and make your own mind up.

The post It's becoming increasingly important to remember that the Internet -- and social media in particular -- presents a grossly distorted vision of how things actually are. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As the stereotype of growing up goes, when you're a teenager you're supposed to decide that you want to "rebel" and be something other than the person that your parents took great effort attempting to craft you into.

For me, I don't think that really happened. I mean, sure, I had plenty of the obligatory stroppy teenager moments, when I'd get angry with my parents for what I saw as irrational or unfair decisions, but I never really stepped into the realms of what I'd describe as "counterculture" in any way other than that which I already was: a computer nerd.

And, in our household, that wasn't really counterculture or rebellion at all; our whole family were interested in computers and video games, since they'd been part of our culture at home since before I was born. Not only that, but my father and my brother regularly contributed to the Atari magazine Page 6 (later New Atari User) — and as I moved into my teenage years, I started to contribute a bit also.

But I digress. Nostalgia for times gone by isn't the point of what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about how homogeneous "Internet culture" has made people today — and how, at the age of forty-one years old, I crave nothing more than rebellion against that homogeneous culture, and feel nothing but frustration at the hordes of people all acting and talking the exact same way.

I'm sure this has always happened in some form or another, but the global nature of the Internet makes it feel like people are losing their own unique (often local) identities. Now, wherever you go, it feels like everyone describes things in the same way, and uses the same often nonsensical turns of phrase.

Every opinion is someone "lowkey thinking" something, even though that doesn't really make any sense.

Every misunderstanding is confronted with "Tell me you haven't [done thing] without telling me you haven't [done thing]."

Every vaguely energetic YouTube video is accompanied by people going "me on the way to school [doing something urgent]."

I feel constant embarrassment at the prospect of linguists of the future looking back at this age and seeing people unironically using the word "pog" at every opportunity.

And there are myriad more, which I'm sure you can think of yourself if you're in a similar position to me.

I can understand why everyone wants to "conform". It's the thing of not wanting to be the outlier, and of wanting to be understood by everyone. But it's boring. If everyone talks about things the same way online — and often has the same opinions, spoon-fed to them by their favourite YouTuber, as often happens — then speaking to one person is much like speaking to any other. You might as well not bother.

Which is why I find myself making a point of very deliberately making use of outdated, very local British slang whenever possible. Yes, it's contrarian, yes, it's childish and stupid, but it's my own little way of feeling like I'm actually my own person rather than being subsumed by the festering, slimy monster that is "Internet culture". Even though I completely recognise that what I'm doing is essentially the exact same thing, only using '90s games magazines as my model.

I think also part of it stems from my Asperger's. Since my diagnosis a few years back, and understanding what that means for my mental health, I feel like I've become much more conscious of the things that sort of "set me off", as it were. And one of those things happens to be predictable, formulaic, repetitive structures, particularly in speech and written communication.

YouTube videos that are always the same drive me bonkers. RuPaul's Drag Race drives me insane for the same reason. And, as I've described, people who all communicate in the exact same way frustrate me also.

I guess in some ways we should perhaps celebrate the way in which people have found how to be near-universally understood online, but I can't help just finding it a bit dull and annoying. I'll keep describing bad things as "bobbins", thank you very much, and replacing the phrase "okay, I understand" with "bonza, Toadie". And there's nothing you can do about it!

The post I thought your teenage years were the time to not conform, but as I get older, non-conformity becomes more appealing. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Those who have been following the saga of social media for a while will know that Twitter is a right old mess right now. Between Elon Musk's incredible ego and a series of bizarre policy changes and introductions (most of which are likely related to Musk's ego in some form or another) it's certainly been interesting to watch the world's most popular social media platform (for how much longer?) go through some trials and tribulations.

But those of you who have been following me for a while will know that Twitter hasn't been much fun for a long time now. When I first joined (which must have been around 2007 or so, maybe?) it was a great place to make new friends, enjoy good conversation and just generally have a good time. But as the years have gone on — and particularly since the significant online upheavals that can be at least partly attributed to the "Gamergate" mess of 2014 — it's become a less and less desirable hangout, for a variety of reasons.

Chief among them for me is the combative, confrontational tone the site as a whole has taken on. While it is still possible to have civil conversations there, it feels like it's much more likely that if you post an opinion of your own someone will come along and shout it down before long. Even if your opinion is not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly important or worth getting upset over.

Anger seems to be the default state for many posters on Twitter, and this is often expressed through some seriously unpleasant behaviour. Anyone who is into Japanese games, for example, will doubtless have seen the disgusting vitriol that gets thrown the way of localisation staff (more specifically, female localisation staff) on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not any "mistakes" have been made. And the same is true in all fields; the quote-tweet dunk is a universal constant, and it does not make for a friendly environment where one wants to hang out.

But alongside all this, Twitter itself has been changing in functional, mechanical terms. The rise of "The Algorithm" on all manner of social sites — with the most notorious being YouTube, of course — has meant that no longer can you count on your social media experience being your own, if indeed it ever was. Rather than showing you the things that your friends have been posting in the order that they were posted, you now get shit you didn't sign up for pushed into your feed as "recommendations", based on the ill-defined assumptions that Twitter makes about "quality content".

I never signed up to Twitter for "quality content". I signed up to chat with folks from a forum we all used to frequent that we weren't able to use any more due to the site's closure. That's all I really wanted. And that's emphatically not what the site provides these days.

So between the change in atmosphere, the change in the way the whole site works and the whole Musk fiasco, I've come to the conclusion that it's simply not worth wasting time pissing around on Twitter any more — if indeed it ever was. Rather, I think it's high time that I brought this blog back, since it's a much better means for me to express myself — plus the comments section is a much nicer way to hold a conversation in most cases. (Unless those people find their way here, but you know how it is.)

So that's what I'm going to do. I'll be keeping my Twitter account open because it's still useful for things like news aggregation and PR contacts, but pretty much all I'll be posting on there is links to stuff I've done, either for work or for pleasure. When I want to actually talk about something, I'll do it here, like in the good old days.

I'm not making any grand promises about posting frequency or anything like that, this is just going to be an "as and when I feel like it" sort of thing. I'm also not going to commit to doing silly comics or anything, even though I know one particular reader (whom I hope is doing well, given that I haven't heard from her for a while) is a big fan! This is my scratch pad, my brain dump and my place to express myself. No "algorithm" rules the roost here, and as such it's a much better means of getting to know me than the toxic bird site.

So see you around here, I hope!

The post My Twitter replacement appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And I'm talking about more than just stepping away from Twitter and Facebook like I have done a few times in the past, as positive as those experiences turned out to be for me. I'm talking about a pretty thorough purge, and a return to a simpler, quieter life with fewer external stressors.

You see, the allure of the Internet and its ability to connect people from all over the world has kind of worn off somewhat for me. The last few years have demonstrated that there are a significant number of people out there who are more interested in conflict, oneupmanship and narcissism than actual meaningful interaction. The fall from grace of the games press — and many game journalists' pretty much unveiled hatred of their audiences — is just one of many examples of this, but the overall negativity that infuses what feels like the vast majority of online communications these days is just proving to be more trouble than it's worth.

I don't need that. It's not adding anything to my life — nothing good, anyway — so, I figure, why continue to put up with it? There's no need to.

As such, starting on New Year's Day, I'm going to begin a process of unplugging as much as I possibly can. Twitter and Facebook are both going completely, since the annoyance both of those bring to my life far outweighs the benefits of both of them. More significantly, I'm planning on ditching the smartphone age in favour of an older, simpler phone that doesn't bug me every five minutes with updates and notifications. At this point, I'm strongly considering picking up a second-hand N-Gage I've seen on Amazon, since that has the added benefit of being an underappreciated and increasingly rare gaming platform as well as a phone I very much enjoyed using when I originally had one.

I'm also going to draw my time with this blog to a close. I'm satisfied with what I've achieved here since I started, but the time has come to move on. I'm not going to give up regular writing, mind you; I'm still going to post weekly articles over on MoeGamer, since those have a clear focus, and I'm also intending to start a weekly TinyLetter as a more private, more personal substitute for my daily updates here. I'll post details on how to sign up for that towards the end of the year, so those of you who want to continue to follow what I'm up to can do so.

I'll be keeping more personal means of communication open. My email address and Google Hangouts accounts will still be active, as will my gaming accounts on Steam, Xbox Live and PSN. But the shouting into the void that is public social media will, hopefully, become a thing of the past. It's no longer enjoyable, useful or fun, so I have no need for it.

I'm not going to put my personal email, Google Hangouts and gaming account addresses in this post for obvious reasons, but if you are interested in staying in touch via any of these means, please feel free to drop me a line via my Contact page explaining who you are and how you know me. If we've chatted before in the past, great, no problem; if we've never spoken before, however, please do include a bit about yourself in your message.

That's the plan, then. And I anticipate that it will lead to a happier, more peaceful and less stressful 2017 for me. At least I hope it does, anyway!

The post 2531: Planning to Unplug appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Occasionally in recent months I've found myself wondering if I should keep this blog going, and/or if so, how long for. Why am I still doing it, who is it for and am I getting anything out of the experience?

On the whole, I think that yes, I do find it to be a valuable and helpful experience on the whole. It's a means for me to express myself to people who know me in a way that I might not find particularly easy or practical to do so in person. It's a means for me to talk about the things I love without having to worry about boring people in the same room as me — if you're not interested in something I talk about for a post or two, simply don't read it. And, of course, it's a means to continue practicing the craft of writing, not that there's a "right" way to do it. (Except for those people who insist on writing all their posts in lower-case letters. Those people are wrong.)

There are things on here that I'm glad I've talked about, and things I wish I'd never brought up. There are good times and bad times; there are things I'm happy about and things that make me infuriated.

More than anything, though, this blog is me. It's a record of, frankly, what has ended up being a rather turbulent period in my life, and it's been something I can focus on each day even if everything else around me might have been shit. It's been a great outlet and a good means of broaching difficult topics as well as a place where I can happily vent my feelings, good and bad, on a daily basis.

So yes, I'm carrying on. Until when, I can't say. But 2,500 daily posts in, it kind of seems like a shame to stop now, huh?

The post 2500: Traditional 500-Post Pondering appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Are you familiar with the subreddit /r/thatHappened? It is one of the more popular subreddits out there, devoted to posting the sort of "PLEASE LIKE AND SHARE!!" garbage that people so like to festoon their social media walls with these days.

Posts that crop up on /r/thatHappened typically have a number of things in common.

Firstly, they usually involve someone making a point of saying they were doing something entirely mundane, like going to school or filling their car with petrol.

Next, they introduce another character of some description, typically a stranger, but one whom the author of the post mysteriously seems to know absolutely everything about, right down to their ethnicity, age, employment status, affluence and anything else you'd care to mention.

Optionally, a child can be involved in the story. If a child is involved in the story, said child will be quoted saying something that no child in the world has ever said, something which can easily be discerned by the use of vocabulary or turn of phrase. Even at my most precocious growing up, when I knew what words like "floccinaucinihilipilification" and "antidisestablishmentarianism" meant (and how to spell them), I still spoke like, y'know, a kid. Kids in these stories never do, usually coming out with some sort of profound wisdom you'd normally expect to hear from a wizened old karate master or something.

The author of the story, the character they introduced (who is inevitably a minority of some description) and/or the child will then become involved in some sort of altercation with an antagonist, who is almost definitely a white male, because as we all know white men are all literally Satan.

The story will then go one of two ways. 1) The author, the character and/or the child will then devastate their opponent in some exaggerated manner, either physically or with razor-sharp wit. The white male(s) will then inevitably leave with their tails between their legs. Alternatively, 2) The author, the character and/or the child will suffer some sort of sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic or transphobic indignity that is so profoundly terrible that the author's immediate reaction was to post it on Facebook rather than take it to the authorities.

In the case of 1): If the altercation took place in a public place such as a school, petrol station or coffee shop, everyone surrounding the author, the character and/or the child will then spontaneously break into applause and at least one person will be crying.

In the case of 2): The author will blame the altercation on a major event that has happened in the news recently and will confess to be "crying right now", with bonus points if they are doing so "into [their] cereal" or some other foodstuff.

In both cases, the author will then attempt to sign off with some sort of quasi-poetic but ultimately asinine truism and encourage everyone to Like, Comment and Share their post to "raise awareness". Said post (which is inevitably set to Public visibility, even if the author typically keeps their social media pages private) will then receive multiple thousands of Likes, Comments and Shares through the phenomenon of virality, with a significant number of people sharing it doing so blindly without bothering to ponder how exactly something quite so improbable happened, or indeed questioning the author on further details of the incident. (This was a terrible racist/sexist/ableist incident, don't you know? You can't ask questions, you might traumatise the poor soul further!)

Once you're familiar with this template, you can spot bullshit a mile off. I encourage you to get intimately acquainted with it before clicking that "Share" button in the future. On a related note, I also encourage you to familiarise yourself with Snopes.com if you aren't already.

That is all.

The post 2488: That Happened appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

At least, I hope this is peak idiot: I present to you an actual article that appeared in the actual business section of the Washington Post, which sported the headline "Is your dog's Halloween costume sexist?"

No. No, your dog's Halloween costume is not sexist. It is a costume for a dog.

Between this and Vice's recent monstrosity of an article about Forza Horizon 3, in which the writer proceeds to spend 1,500 words using the Australian setting of Forza Horizon 3 (a game about nothing more than driving pretty cars very fast around pretty scenery) as an excuse to go off on a tirade against Australian politics in general (actual specific references to the game come in just two out of the article's 13 paragraphs), it's hard to imagine if online journalism can get any worse. It's even harder to imagine exactly why there are people out there who still defend this kind of garbage.

I've been continuing to read old back issues of Page 6, Atari User, ANALOG, Antic and ACE recently, and one thing that repeatedly strikes me whenever I read any of these magazines is that the writers know their audience because they are part of that audience. And in the case of all those magazines, that audience is computer enthusiasts; who better to write for them than fellow enthusiasts? Should be a no-brainer, surely.

Nope; instead we get dross that reads like it was written by a recent Social Sciences graduate and which inevitably takes a negative tone of some description — usually of the "Here Are All The Reasons You Should Feel Bad for Liking the Things You Do" variety — rather than performing what, I believe, is a much more valuable function: bringing people together under the banner of the things they love, celebrating those things and perhaps teaching them some intricate, specialist details.

Take the old Atari magazines. Every single one of these, without fail, opened its first issue with a comment from the editor about how Atari computers are far more than just the games machines that people at the time apparently assumed they were. The stated aim of Page 6, ANALOG, Antic and Atari User alike was to explore the length and breadth of titles available for the Atari computer, teaching enthusiasts new things along the way. These old magazines had type-in BASIC listings with full breakdowns of what was happening where in the program, memory maps of the computers so you could learn to program in machine code, special techniques that could elevate your programming from "eh" to "wow!" and all manner of other stuff.

The most negative things ever got was in the editorial section, where editors would occasionally vent their spleen about Atari's repeated failures to market their own products, or about how they had been let down by industry contacts. This was always framed as an explanation of why, say, the issue didn't have a feature that readers might expect, rather than being the sole point of the article. The articles themselves were all positive in tone, often educational and far less frustrating to read than the daily garbage modern online journalists seem to be expected to churn out to order.

Times have changed, of course. Magazines used to be published monthly or, in some cases, bi-monthly. Internet publications are expected to be updated on a daily basis, otherwise they are seen as "irrelevant" and "not up to date". With the amount of pressure on Internet writers, it's little surprise that they pluck something out of their arse that they know will "get people talking" (i.e. is contentious for one reason or another) rather than spending the time to do proper research or to enthuse about the things they are passionate about.

There's too much negativity in the world as it is, and it's coming from all angles: both traditional media and social media. Negativity begets negativity, and the longer it goes on, the more cynical we get. We're at a stage now where many people simply don't trust the online press to cover things as an enthusiast would, and that's going to be hard to recover from. Meanwhile, the Men In Suits see outrage-bait like the articles linked above as "successes" because they bring in the clicks and consequent advertising revenue.

Advertising impressions lie, however. An impression on an article in the commercial press doesn't mean someone liked what the author had to say. More often than not, it's the result of someone having a look at an article out of sheer disbelief that someone really wrote an article about dogs' Halloween costumes being sexist, or about how Forza Horizon 3 depicts a "better Australia than [Australians] deserve".

I wish it were possible to just make this mess stop, and for us all to go back to a world where enthusiasts write about the things they are knowledgeable about rather than everyone, everywhere trying to make everything somehow "political". There's a time and a place for politics, and, unless you are reviewing a game that deals with political issues — either through its narrative or its mechanics — then that place is emphatically not in the games press. Certainly not in an article about a driving game; and certainly not in an article about a driving game that exists solely to revel in the sheer joy of driving.

Also, you can dress your dog up however the fuck you like so long as you're not hurting it. Make it extra slutty, take loads of photos for Facebook and immediately unfriend anyone who whines about sexism. You don't need dickholes like that in your life.

The post 2446: We've Reached Peak Idiot appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, I was browsing through the digital editions of the old magazines I downloaded from AtariMania and came across a short series of articles written by my Dad about "going online".

This was pre-Internet "going online", however, involving a 64K Atari 800XL, a 300 baud modem and an external interface for plugging in such devices, and as such involved dialling up bulletin board services (BBSes) directly to access their information and files.

What struck me when reading my Dad's wide-eyed wonderment at being able to phone up a computer in Birmingham, read messages and download programs (a much more cumbersome process than we take for granted today, involving downloading the program into a "buffer" and then saving it to floppy disk or cassette afterwards) was the fact that any time he mentioned interacting with other people — usually through the BBSes' approximation of a "forum", which allowed people to post and reply to short, simple text-based messages — he was struck with how pleasant, polite and enthusiastic people were. These BBSes were generally run by enthusiasts rather than professional, commercial organisations and consequently tended to attract people in a similar vein.

Fast forward to today and I witness this somewhat sad, plaintive monologue from PR superhero Tom Ohle of Evolve PR:

I'm with Tom here, but I'm at a loss as to how we got from the enjoyably enthusiastic experience my Dad described in these articles to a situation where the default tone on the Internet is aggressive, confrontational, cynical and negative.

This isn't universal, of course — there are still plenty of community groups that are made up of genuine enthusiasts, and interestingly enough many of them are still centred around the Atari community — but even among such community groups you find trolls, naysayers and people who are always keen to see the negative in everything.

This is particularly apparent in the gamer community, who are seemingly never satisfied by anything — blockbuster triple-A games are too formulaic, indie games are too weird, imported games are too "censored" — but it happens right across the Internet, make no mistake.

It's usually explained away by the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

And for a while that was plausible. But it's not as simple as that any more: the rise in services such as Facebook means that people are quite comfortable being total fuckwads even with their real name attached to the nonsense they're spouting. And it seems to be the default tone these days, which is disheartening; it's actually unusual when you find a community that isn't full of complainers.

Perhaps it's a consequence of throwing everyone from all different backgrounds all together into a melting pot, resulting in inevitable culture clash. Or perhaps the world of today really does engender negativity rather than positivity — I know that I certainly don't feel particularly happy about the way the world is these days, though my way of attempting to counter it is instead to focus on the things that I do love.

Whatever the explanation, I feel it's sad how things have developed since those innocent days of dialling up that BBS in Birmingham and having to explain to my mother why we were on the phone for so long. I feel we've gone backwards rather than forwards, and that it's probably too late to do anything about it now.

All an individual can do, I guess, is try their best not to be part of it.

The post 2436: Default Tone appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

(This was supposed to post last night but didn't for some reason.)

If anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.

Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no, really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself.

Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

Seriously.

No this is not a joke. You’re going, “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself

Planting seeds.

I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scumbags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.

– Bill Hicks

It makes me feel a little bit sick inside to recall that when I was a child, I used to actually enjoy the advert breaks on commercial TV. There were ads I used to look forward to seeing, and ads that I still remember today that, to my knowledge, I only ever saw broadcast once.

The reason this memory makes me feel a bit sick is because I look around today and look at all the damage advertising has done to so many aspects of modern life, and I'm disgusted and ashamed.

Mobile phone games, once thought to be a true competitor to home computers and consoles, have been ruined by advertising. Creative work has been devalued to such a degree that it's now a significant risk for a developer to release anything at a price point above "free" (with in-app purchases of up to £80 a time, mind you), with ads punctuating every aspect of the game experience — or, in the worst-designed cases, actively getting in the way of what you want to do.

Games journalism has been ruined by advertising. Earlier today I saw a link to a "review in progress" of a soccer game. The "review in progress" format is usually reserved for games that it is impossible to review based on a launch-day experience — things like MMOs or multiplayer-centric titles. But it's increasingly being used by publishers to stake a claim on all-important search engine optimisation terms and ad revenue by posting an article that includes both the game name and the word "review" in its URL — thereby attracting anyone casually Googling "[game name] review" — without having to actually do a full job of reviewing a game in the traditional sense, and lapping up the ad revenue in the process. Not only that, we have sites spamming articles about the latest, most popular games — even if the sites' verdict on said game was that it wasn't very good, as has happened with Rock, Paper, Shotgun and divisive space sim No Man's Sky — and pulling in those precious ad revenue clicks by anyone Googling the game in question.

Online video streaming has been ruined by advertising. Earlier I was attempting to watch an episode of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown — hardly the most thrilling or cerebral viewing, but I was enjoying it at the time as an accompaniment to dinner — and the ad break halfway through the programme crashed. When this happens, there is no way to skip the "broken" ad because oh no, you have to watch five minutes of adverts before you can see the rest of the programme, and if you can't watch those five minutes of ads, well then, you're not seeing the rest of the programme.

The Internet in general has been ruined by advertising. I can't think of many sites I've been to recently that haven't had some sort of obtrusive background, auto-playing video trailer or worse, complete page takeover making the browsing experience actively unpleasant. One of the worst offenders is one of the most useful sites on the Web: Wikia, which allows users to create wikis for any topic under the sun, but which makes the site practically unusable on mobile by first loading the page in, then loading a full-page pop-over ad a couple of seconds later which you inevitably click on when you're trying to simply follow a link in the text.

Computer software has been ruined by advertising. Whether it's Windows bugging you to upgrade or anti-virus software promising you a "free gift" that is actually just the ability to subscribe to its premium service for the same price it always is, not even in the world of productivity can you escape someone, somewhere trying to extract money from you.

I hate, loathe and despise it, particularly when I see how demoralised it makes people who want so desperately to do things ethically, but who inevitably find themselves trampled underfoot by people with fewer scruples.

I think I hate it most of all for what it's done to something I love, though: writing about games. There's little to no room for passion in the commercial games press today; instead, it's all "you must have [x] articles about [insert popular game name here] up by the end of the week". It does the wonderful diversity of the medium an incredible disservice, and I feel sorry for those people who, like me, are genuinely passionate about the things they enjoy, but who struggle to get heard and can't even think about making a living from what they love.

Unfortunately, it's the world we live in now. I'm kinda with Mr. Hicks on this one.

The post 2429: Ads Ruin Everything appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I poked my head on to Twitter earlier — not to participate or engage, because I think I've well and truly broken my former addiction to it, but instead simply to share the article on Ys that I spent all day writing.

Literally immediately — and yes, I do mean literally — I saw someone indulging in one of the reasons I stopped wanting to use Twitter in the first place: pointless, unnecessary handwringing and guilt over things that were nothing to do with them.

The person in question, whom I had previously thought to be a fairly level-headed, rational sort of individual, went on an 8-tweet tirade about how awful the 4th of July was and how Americans enjoying and celebrating what has become nothing more than a holiday — regardless of its history — was somehow racist.

I closed the tab straight after I shared the link to my work, because frankly I don't have time for that shit.

One might argue that it's a good thing the Internet has supposedly made us all more socially responsible and aware of all the terrible things in the world — and perhaps it is. However, one thing the Internet very rarely does is actually do anything about these terrible things in the world. Whether it's people changing their Facebook avatars to "raise awareness" for a charity (I think they'd rather have your bank details, thanks), someone painting their nails in protest against the amorphous concept of "toxic masculinity" or flaccid "protests" against whatever the issue du jour is, Internet activism achieves absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Actually, no, that's not true — it does achieve something. But it's not anything good.

The only thing Internet activism achieves is to drive wedges between people — alienating people from one another, and drawing very, very clear battle lines that you can only ever be on one side or the other of. Us and them. The "right side of history" and its respective "wrong side". If you're not with us, you're against us. That sort of thing.

The inherently divisive nature of self-proclaimed activists' behaviour online has had an overall enormously negative impact on online discourse as a whole. As I noted in my post where I decided to set Twitter aside, people who believe strongly in things (or at least consider themselves to believe strongly in things) have a tendency to take an "I'm right, you're wrong" approach with no middle ground. And this is true for everyone who holds strong opinions on one thing or another, whether it's "censorship" in games, the supposed epidemic of "misogyny" that the Internet is suffering, or who they think should win the Presidential election.

The general unwillingness to take other people's perspectives into account has ruined all sense of rational discourse on social media. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it's certainly soured the experience for me; social media of all types (with the exception of this blog, if that counts, which I don't really feel it does) had just stopped being fun, and seeing that string of tweets today the moment I opened the Twitter page drove it home for me. There was a stark contrast between this and the private conversation I was having with my friend Chris at the time, whereby we disagreed on our opinions regarding the video game Limbo — he liked it, I hated it — and somehow, magically, managed to do so without feeling the need to convince the other person that they were wrong. We simply enjoy different things, and talking about those things you don't have in common as much as the things you do makes for some of the most interesting conversations.

You can enjoy your life, or you can spend your time getting pointlessly angry about things and people on the Internet. I've got games to play and things to write, so I know which one I choose.

The post 2360: A Life Without Social Media is a Life Without Pointless Outrage and Guilt appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, it's been a few days since I stepped away from Twitter, Facebook and social media in general (that includes my very, very occasional visits to Reddit) and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. I'm not feeling especially isolated, since I 1) have other outlets through which I can talk about the things I want to talk about, and 2) have other means of talking to the people I actually want to talk to.

One experiment that I'm pleased with the progress of so far is my new Pile of Shame website. Here I'm using WordPress' P2 theme to basically fulfil one of the things I did still enjoy using Twitter for: sharing my thoughts and reactions on games that I'm playing, perhaps in the hope of convincing other people to check out said games after having seen a screenshot that piqued their interest or a description they found intriguing.

I guess what I'm essentially doing is microblogging a "Let's Play" of the games I'm playing, though I still far, far prefer the written/blog format for such things, even though video or streaming is probably a much more practical solution for doing it. When I think about what I'd be interested in seeing, though, should I ever find myself wanting to see what someone else's thoughts on a game are, video is very low down the list, particularly when it comes to looking at things on mobile. I'd much rather read something — even if it's bite-sized nuggets at irregular intervals — than watch a video and suffer through some idiot YouTuber's attempts to be a comedy god. (This is unfair, of course; I know plenty of people who make YouTube videos and stream who aren't immensely irritating, but sadly the ones who tend to get really popular are the ones who are immensely irritating. It's just like TV or other forms of popular media in that regard, I guess.)

But anyway. Check out the Pile of Shame site if you're interested in following what I've been playing — currently Ys Seven and VA-11 HALL-A — and feel free to leave comments.

Speaking more broadly, I'm not missing social media because it means no opportunity for me to get annoyed at all the things that are annoying on social media. These things differ from platform to platform: on Facebook it's the sheer amount of links I don't want to read that are shared by people I don't want to talk to — along with people thinking that they're suddenly God's gift to politics/economics/racism — while on Twitter it's the seemingly daily occurrence of one group or another getting upset, offended and/or angry about something or other. I don't care about any of it any more. I just want to exist in my own world, surrounded by people I actually care about and enjoy the things I enjoy without people crying about, by turns, censorship, misogyny, sexism, racism, People of Colour, Nintendo, Activision, EA, Japanese games, Western games, Gamergate, Call of Duty and whatever else has got people's respective goats this week.

The other positive feeling I have when not checking Twitter and/or Facebook every five minutes is the time and inclination to check out other sites on the Web. As any social addict will tell you, it's very easy to fall into the trap of feeling like Twitter and Facebook (and perhaps Reddit and its ilk) are the only sites on the Internet. Cut them out of your life, and there's a rich vein of interesting stuff you suddenly have time to explore; most notably, recently, I've finally been exploring the wonderful Hardcore Gaming 101, an admirably comprehensive site that covers hundreds of games in a delightful level of detail, including games from my youth that I don't think I've seen written about anywhere else on the Internet. Just last night I was reading a detailed rundown of the Dunjonquest series, for example, which I knew during the Atari 8-bit era through the games Gateway to Apshai and Temple of Apshai Trilogy. Tonight I'm reading about all the Asterix games that have been released over the years, and the site has also made for some interesting reading as I have been going through the Ys series for the first time.

There's a pleasantly wide world out there, and ditching the various virtual rooms full of people screaming at you for one reason or another makes it all the easier to see it. I'm very much enjoying the quiet.

(Note: My Twitter account is still live, sharing articles from both here and the Pile of Shame site, but it is not monitored. Please don't try and send me messages on Twitter because I won't see them! Instead, see this post for other ways to get hold of me. Or just leave a comment here.)

The post 2344: Life without Social appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've reached this situation before, as longtime readers will doubtless remember, but I think I've lost patience with public social media (specifically Twitter and Facebook), and as such I think for the benefit of my mental health and overall enjoyment of life, I'm going to step away. I'll talk more about the reasons in a moment for those of you who are interested, but before I do that I'd like to share the important stuff: how you can get in touch with me if you so desire.

Email: pjedavison at gmail dot com, or you can use the Contact page on this site, which comes through to the same address.

Google Chat: My only real form of private IM; same email address as above. I have a few other IM services but don't use them much, so please don't try and chat to me on Skype because I probably won't know you're trying to reach me!

Discord: You can drop in on my server at https://discord.gg/0PVr1hioSgchWQAs and/or add me as a friend under ID Amarysse#2465.

Pete's Pile of Shame: I'm going to post some "live" thoughts and media relating to the games I'm playing over at this new site. Feel free to leave comments.

Note that I will be leaving my various Twitter accounts open, but not monitoring them. They will simply reshare my articles and posts from my sites. Likewise for Facebook. Please do not try to contact me using either Twitter or Facebook, because I won't reply or even see your message!

If you want to play games with me, here are my various game IDs you might want:

PSN: Angry_Jedi
Xbox Live: sonicfunkstars
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/angryjedi
Battle.net: AngryJedi#2260
Final Fantasy XIV: Amarysse Jerhynsson, Ultros server (VinCo Free Company)

Okay. Onto the reasoning for me stepping away, if you care.

To put it bluntly, I'm tired of negativity, because that's what social media seems to have become a magnet for. If people aren't sharing the latest in Awful News from Around the World, they're trying their damnedest to be contrary at every opportunity. No-one agrees with anything any more; everyone seems to perpetually feel the need to "correct" everyone else or have a differing viewpoint.

It's the problem with everyone being able to express their opinions, in other words: everyone feels the need to have their own opinion, and heaven forbid it be the same as someone else's. Arguments erupt over the most stupid things, and people snark about things that don't matter with sufficient aggressiveness and determination to make considering talking about almost anything an unpleasant prospect. As someone who already feels a great amount of social anxiety during in-person interactions, to start feeling this way about online interactions, too — a manner of interacting which I had previously found much more comfortable and pleasant, but which I am starting to recoil away from — this is not the way I want to be feeling.

I'll give you a simple example from today: earlier, I learned that Microsoft sells hilariously awful-looking soft porn movies on its marketplace — a storefront which is accessible on its Xbox One console — and yet we still can't have Adults Only-rated games on consoles due to outdated concerns about Wal*Mart and Gamestop not stocking their shelves with anything controversial. I made a glib observation to this effect, and rather than a simple response of "Oh, interesting" or "huh, that is weird", the first response I got felt the need to correct me on my use of the word "porn". Apparently "topless" is not the same as "porn".

This interaction in itself wasn't anything unusual or particularly hurtful, but it was the proverbial straw that… you know. It exemplified everything that's come to frustrate me about social media in the last few years; coupled with the fact that no-one ever seems to be happy about anything any more — between people whining about misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, censorship, Donald Trump, black people, white people, Asian people, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Germans, Belgians, gamers, games journalists, Anita Sarkeesian, feminists, men's rights activists, Facebook, Twitter, Simon Cowell, Nigel Farage, gun enthusiasts, people who drink Mountain Dew, people who do fanart "wrong" and any number of other things, it's no wonder I'm feeling particularly miserable and negative about life in general, really, is it?

So the most sensible thing to do from a mental health perspective when something starts making you miserable is to cut that thing out of your life altogether. Preferably cold turkey. But the thing that always makes me hesitate is the fact that amid all the negativity and bullshit, I have struck up some genuine friendships, and I'd hate to lose those. I'd hate to lose contact with people like Mike Cunningham from RPGamer; Steve Baltimore, Joe "Eritach" Sigadel and several others from Operation Rainfall; the glorious perverts of Anitwitter such as Vyers, Ashley, Luka, Firion, Bubbel, Xiaomu, Rin, Radkatsu, TheHatPerson and doubtless hundreds of others I've forgotten to mention. (If I didn't call you out by name here, it's to save time and space, not because I don't want to stay in touch! Unless you're a shithead. In which case I probably wasn't following you anyway.)

As such, then, the details above are there in an attempt to stay in contact with people I want to stay in contact with, despite intending to leave what has previously been our primary means of communication behind. Please do feel free to use them and to say hi to me using any of the means listed; they're there to be used, so don't feel like you're "intruding" in any way by sending me a friend request or a private message via some other non social media means.

In order to continue one thing I did enjoy about Twitter — posting "live" thoughts and reactions to games I'm playing — I've set up this site to continue doing so. It'll probably be primarily PC games on there, as sharing console or handheld screenshots and other media is a bit more of a faff, but if you want to see what I'm up to and share your own thoughts on games I'm playing, feel free to drop by and leave a comment.

I'll be leaving my various Twitter accounts and my Facebook page active in order to share things like these blog posts and my other content from around the Web, but I won't be actively checking them, so please don't use them to try and get in touch with me. No, really; I've turned off notifications on my phone and everything, so if you try and say something via one of those means, I won't see it.

I'll be continuing to post here each and every day, sporadically on my new site and (hopefully) weekly on MoeGamer. Those are the best ways of keeping up to date with what I'm doing and having a chat with me, so feel free to follow and comment on any of them.

Hopefully stepping away will allow me to regain a little perspective and a lot of wasted time on a daily basis. If nothing else, it's probably healthy to get away from relentless negativity, particularly when I'm already depressed and anxious.

Thanks for reading if you came this far; hopefully I'll hear from some of you elsewhere on the Internet sometime soon.

The post 2341: Taking a Break from Social Media; Here's Where to Find Me appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hi Wil,

You don't know me, and I don't know you. Apparently I've done something to offend you in the past, though, because you have me blocked on Twitter. I don't know why and I don't know when this happened because as far as I know, we've had no direct interaction on any occasion ever, but I will apologise for whatever it was anyway. I will also express my sincere disappointment that someone I used to look up to as a bastion of what modern nerd culture should aspire to feels somehow threatened or upset with something I've done in the past — threatened or upset enough to simply cut me off from the prospect of ever interacting with him.

I was an avid viewer of many of the Geek and Sundry videos when it first launched — particularly Tabletop, which introduced my friends and I to a number of board games that are still in our regular rotation. Tabletop was an excellent show that gave a good flavour of how the various games played — even if there were occasional bits of fuzzing over the rules in the name of keeping things snappy! — as well as providing a great opportunity for some of the most entertaining, fun people in geek culture to come together and have a good time. A good time that was infectious — so enjoyable was the atmosphere on Tabletop that it felt like the audience was right there with you all, sitting around the game table, rooting for your favourite player to win and commiserating with you when you inevitably came lost. (As the resident person in our tabletop gaming group who perpetually comes last in pretty much everything, I could relate to your position quite a bit.)

On a more serious note, nerd culture in general is something that I've talked a lot in the past about giving me a lifeline when I needed it. In the case of video games, they've provided a constant and much-needed centre of stability in a life that has often been chaotic and beyond my control and understanding; in the case of tabletop gaming, they provide one of the few means of face-to-face social interaction in which I feel completely comfortable, whether it's with close friends or, as it was for me this Friday evening just gone, complete strangers. I think it's the fact that interactions over a tabletop game are, for the most part, clearly structured: it's why I gravitate towards games with clear rules, turn structures and player roles as well as those with strong themes that include flavour text I can read out dramatically to our group. Conversely, those games that require a certain degree of negotiation or freeform interaction are those I feel less comfortable with, since I'm sometimes not quite sure what I'm "supposed" to say.

But all that's by the by; it's just a bit of context of who I am. Needless to say, games of both the video and tabletop variety are extremely important to me; as you said in your keynote speech at PAX East in 2010, "some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter." I agree entirely, and when I took a risk, flying from the UK to Boston, MA for that PAX East — my first time attending such an event, and only, I think, the second time I'd taken a solo trans-Atlantic flight — I found somewhere that I really felt like I belonged. My life was, at that point, a bit of a mess: my marriage was falling apart — my wife at the time would go on to leave me shortly after I returned from Boston — and I didn't have a reliable source of income. Games gave me a sense of being grounded; somewhere to retreat to when I couldn't face the terror that everyday life at the time confronted me with. Games gave me common ground with which I could interact with other people; games gave me something to talk about, something that I could call "mine".

That time in my life was turbulent. I've had ups and downs since then, and as I type this I'm very much in a "down". Over the years since 2010, I've come to recognise the importance of acknowledging one's emotions, the causes of these emotions and the ways to deal with them. I'm not afraid to cry as I once was back in high school; as someone who sometimes has difficulty expressing exactly what he wants to say verbally, there are times when bursting into tears says more than words ever can; there are others when the act of opening those floodgates allows the repressed emotions to be released in a more controlled manner once you've calmed down a bit, letting you communicate what's really bothering you after the storm has subsided. Crying is important. Crying matters.

Which is why this image you posted on Twitter bothers me so much:

For anyone reading this letter who doesn't already know, the expression "male tears" is usually used by the more toxic side of online activism as a means of demonising men — usually straight, white men — when they wish to express themselves. It's largely brought out during arguments between the more militant side of feminism and those — usually, but not exclusively, men — who are tired of all the sociopolitically charged fighting that takes place every day on the Internet, particularly those who fight back somewhat aggressively with foul language, threats and exhortations for people to kill themselves. The "joke", such as it is, is that all this unpleasantness just bounces off the noble "progressive" types — referred to disparagingly by their critics as "Social Justice Warriors" or "SJWs" for short, an epithet which these people flip-flop between absolutely hating and trying desperately to reclaim in the same way black culture has largely reappropriated "nigga" for itself — and is just interpreted as straight, white men crying about something not going their way for once; the fact that "male tears" is written on a mug allows the "progressive" activist the opportunity to drink from it, suggesting that they relish the opportunity to feed on the tears of their enemies.

Pretty unpleasant however you look at it, and while the original intention may not have been to reinforce traditional ideals of what these same people call "toxic masculinity" — stereotypes such as "big boys don't cry" and "be a man for once" — I can't help but look at it that way. Speaking as a (straight, white) man who does cry, isn't ashamed of the fact that he cries and, in fact, has cried quite a bit over the last few months due to his own life situation and the suffering of the person he loves most dearly in the world: to see the idea of "male tears" used so gleefully and indiscriminately as a means of oneupmanship, of proving one's "progressiveness" feels grossly distasteful and insensitive. To have it proudly promoted by someone I once looked up to as almost an idol; someone I thought I could aspire to follow in the footsteps of; someone who proved that a person with my interests could find success and a place for themselves in the world? That just feels like a stab in the back, with a few good twists for good measure.

I don't deserve to feel like that, and I'm pretty certain I'm not the only person who feels this way. Some may express their disappointment and upset with this more eloquently or more aggressively than others, but however they choose to register their discontent and however much or little I agree with their methods of expressing it, I understand it completely. As someone who, now 35 years of age, was often ostracised and ridiculed for his interests and hobbies in his youth, was subsequently delighted when geek culture started to become fashionable over the course of the last decade and most recently has noted with a growing sense of discomfort that the things he finds most relatable, most important to him are those that are getting relentlessly torn down in the name of being "progressive"? It hurts. A lot.

I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't hurt anyone. I just want to be left alone to enjoy the things I enjoy with friends who also enjoy those things, and likewise to leave those who are interested in different things to do what they enjoy. I don't care about this perpetually raging culture war that has all but destroyed meaningful online discourse around video games in particular over the last five or six years, and put a serious strain on a number of friendships. I don't believe in a "one size fits all" approach to inclusivity and diversity, which is what many "progressive" types seem to argue for; I instead subscribe to a "many sizes fit many" ethos, which makes for a more vibrant, interesting and cross-pollinating culture in the long-term. And yet somehow, at some point, I've been branded with a scarlet letter, thrown in the pit with all the other social rejects. I've also been called a paedophile, a pervert, a misogynist and plenty of other things besides. My crime? I like Japanese video games with pretty girls in, and frequently argue against the misrepresentation of these games as soft porn in the mainstream press by those who won't take the time to engage with them.

Frankly, the whole situation makes me want to cry, but now I feel I shouldn't, because it will just, apparently, give you some sort of satisfaction. And that, to be honest, seems like the very inverse of your own credo, your own Wheaton's Law, of "Don't be a dick!"

You almost certainly won't read this, Wil, because having blocked me on Twitter I'm not sure there's any way you'll see it outside of someone you haven't blocked directly sharing it with you, and I don't see that happening. But I wanted to post it anyway; even if you don't read it, hopefully it will bring some sense of comfort to those who feel the same way I do about all this; put some feelings into words; provide a sense of solidarity.

As you argued in your speech, this feeling of solidarity, of belonging, is extremely important. We should all strive to help each other feel like we belong doing the things we love with the people we love in the places we love. With photos like the one posted above, you deliberately block off people from feeling like they can engage with this part of culture they adore, and people they might well otherwise get on with. And whether or not you believe that "male tears" only applies to men who don't know how to behave themselves politely and appropriately, know that it can — and will, and has — been interpreted in a way that just comes across as exclusive, combative and gatekeeping: the exact opposite of what you yourself argue we should aim for.

This whole situation needs to stop, as soon as possible. I hate it. Everyone else I know hates it. Can't we all just get around a gaming table and settle this the old-fashioned way: with dice, cards and chits — maybe even some fancy miniatures?

Thank you for your time, and thanks for reading, whether you're Wil Wheaton (unlikely) or some random passer-by who just wanted to see what I had to say.

Love & Peace
Pete

The post 2308: An Open Letter to @wilw About Games as a Lifeline, "Male Tears" and Inexplicable Blocks appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Back in the early days of "going online" — after the days of Bulletin Board Systems but before the widespread Internet we know today — our family used CompuServe to get at information online.

For a teenager like I was at the time, it was very exciting. For the first time, I was able to "meet" and communicate with people from all over the world, discuss common interests and even exchange files.

One of my favourite features of CompuServe was an area it rather grandiosely referred to as the "CB Simulator", after the units used by ham radio operators to communicate with other enthusiasts over the radio waves. In reality, it was simply what we now know today as a chatroom, but it was a revelation to the young me, who had always had a bit of difficulty finding new people to talk to, particularly those who were into the same things.

In the CB Simulator, I could talk to people without fear of them, say, judging me for my appearance, or my mannerisms that clearly indicated I was uncomfortable with talking to strangers, or how I tended to go the colour of beetroot when talking to girls I liked. No; in the CB Simulator, I was able to communicate in the way I had always felt most comfortable: through the written word.

A few years later, when "the Internet" started to become more of a thing and self-contained, fenced-off communities like CompuServe and AOL were starting to become less of a thing, I looked into Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. There, I found a similar experience to that which I'd had in CompuServe's CB Simulator: the ability to communicate and express myself through text to people from all over the world. And now, I could "emote" too, which in turn led to my first experiences with online roleplaying through a group that "simulated" Star Trek missions through text chat.

I was kind of sad when chatrooms fell out of favour with the rise of what we now know as social media, but for those of you, like me, who always used to enjoy the real-time nature of talking in chatrooms, may I introduce you to the wonderful service that is Discord, which is now celebrating its first birthday.

Originally designed as a free, lightweight alternative to Skype and Teamspeak, Discord has been actively developed over the last year to become one of the best — arguably the best — real-time chat application out there, particularly if you're a gamer.

For the unfamiliar, it works in a slightly different way to instant messaging services such as Skype and its earlier counterparts AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Instead of focusing on private chats with individuals on your friends list, Discord is instead server-based, much like IRC was. Within that server — again like IRC — there are channels for whatever purposes the server admins desire. Anyone who is a member of that server — and servers can be public or private — can hop in to a channel and text chat. There's voice chat facilities, too, which have very good, reliable, clear voice quality and connections, making it an ideal solution for "party chat" on PC, or even using alongside games that don't normally offer voice communication: the Splatoon community, for example, use it quite a bit, since that game has no means of direct communication whatsoever.

Mostly the thing that excites me about Discord is how much it feels like those old IRC servers, only with a more modern coat of paint. Inline image posts, markdown formatting, animated GIFs and link previews are all a natural evolution of the purely text-based chat that IRC offered, and Discord's cross-platform nature — it works via the Web, on PC or Mac desktop clients or even on mobile — makes it an ideal means for keeping in touch with groups of friends or specialised communities.

I'm very happy that Discord has been such a success since it originally launched, and hope it continues to be A Thing for many years to come yet. It's been a great way for me to interact with friends from elsewhere on the Internet in new, more immediate ways than services like Twitter offer, and, depending on the server, it can be a nice quiet safe haven away from the noise of more public social media channels.

I'm a member of several different Discord servers, but the one on which I'm most active is probably the one I'm an admin of. If you'd like to stop by and say hi — the server is largely focused on video games, anime, lewds and general shitposting, but everyone there is just happy to have a good chinwag — then you can do so by following this link.

Happy birthday, Discord, and happy chatting to those of you who choose to come and join us!

The post 2306: Happy Birthday, Discord appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's a new-ish trend on social media. And like most new-ish trends on social media, it's not a particularly pleasant one.

Known as "virtue signalling", it essentially involves people making public statements that make it abundantly clear that they hold what is widely regarded to be the "correct" viewpoint on something, be this feminism, homosexuality, Donald Trump, immigration, unisex bathrooms, whether or not we should leave Europe, gun control and whether or not Uncharted 4 deserved more than an 8.8 out of 10.

It's an offshoot of a couple of other social media behaviours that have been happening for a while, most notably Twitter's "dot-reply" practice, which gets around Twitter's usual behaviour of not showing people you follow replying to people you don't follow (because why would you want to "listen in" on a conversation involving someone you don't know?), and the related practice of people complaining at companies on Twitter without putting the company in question's user ID in an @mention at the start of the tweet. "Hey, @amazon, your customer service today was shocking!" — you know, that sort of thing.

Both of these practices — and virtue signalling too, for that matter — are a means of amplifying one's own voice and trying to get noticed. Typically, social media consists of lots of people on a reasonably equal footing all shouting into the void and occasionally having conversations with one another. When you bring in dot-replies, public replies and virtue signalling, however, it becomes less about your actual message and more about public perception of you. When you engage in any of these behaviours, you're trying your very best to get your message heard and, crucially, reshared by as many people as possible. In that way, the word can spread about What A Fine Example of Humanity you are, and you can subsequently reap the social capital rewards from successfully Saying the Right Thing in Front of the Right People.

Taking a public stand on things isn't necessarily a bad thing. But unfortunately, the very nature of social media has a habit of distorting messages beyond recognition, and when combined with such transparent attempts to spread your message as far and wide as possible as what we've just described, the global game of Chinese Whispers kicks into overdrive and your message — which may well have been flawed in the first place, or perhaps just misinterpreted somewhere along the line — gets taken at face value, for better or worse.

And people these days simply do not question the things that are presented to them. This is particularly bad on Facebook, where many people — particularly those less Web-literate — will happily share completely untrue stories without bothering to check the validity of them, and their friends, equally Web-illiterate, will share them further, until they've been around the world and back, with a significant number of people believing the load of old bollocks that some troll from 4chan probably dreamed up in an attempt to see how many idiots he could net.

It happens on Twitter, too, though, and through the media as well. A recent example came via the subreddit for Ubisoft's multiplayer shooter The Division, where a user made up a completely false glitch-based strategy for one of the bosses, and said "cheat" was picked up by numerous high-profile gaming websites without bothering to check whether or not it was legitimate for themselves. (It would have been easy enough to do so, given that the user in question actually posted another thread on Reddit at the same time with a legitimate strategy for the same encounter, admitting that his "glitch" was a complete fabrication.)

And this lack of questioning or critical thinking is poisonous when it's combined with virtue signalling. Opinions that someone made up become accepted as irrefutable fact simply because someone "important" shared them, or lots of people shared them. Take the Ghostbusters reboot trailer, for example — now famous for being the most disliked YouTube video in the site's history. The story runs now that it is the most hated video in existence "because of misogyny" — and there's simply no arguing with that, because so many people  have made loud, proud statements about how they're going to give Ghostbusters a chance because they're not misogynist at all, no sirree, and that means that anyone who simply thinks the trailer is shit (it kinda is) gets thrown under the bus with the genuine misogynists and the trolls who enjoy stirring the pot for the hell of it.

Generally speaking, I tend to take the attitude that if you have to shout loudly about what a wonderful person you are, you probably aren't a particularly wonderful person in the first place. So far I'm yet to be proven wrong with this theory.

The post 2302: By the Power of the Virtues appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Nintendo released its mobile-social app Miitomo recently. I wasn't going to check it out as I tend to find most mobile-social apps completely and utterly pointless drivel that only serves to make your brain dribble out of your ears, but the number of people I knew who were giving this a go inspired me to give it a chance — as did the fact it sounded a little like the "social questions" services such as Ask.fm, Formspring, Retrospring and the like that had been popular in the last few years.

So what is Miitomo? Well, after a slightly convoluted sign-up process, which requires you to create a Nintendo Account (which is not the same as a Nintendo Network ID, nor a Club Nintendo account, though the former can be used as a quick means of registering if you have a 3DS and/or Wii U) you're given the opportunity to create a Mii to represent yourself. If you used a Nintendo Network ID to create your account, you can import this directly from your account; alternatively, you can create a new one if you prefer, either by getting the app to attempt an automatic creation process from a self-portrait, or manually through picking and choosing bits and pieces for the Mii's face.

Miitomo goes a step further than Mii creation on Nintendo's consoles, though, since you have the opportunity to set up a voice and personality for it. Personality largely dictates the variety of animations the Mii uses when it's talking and how generally "expressive" it is, while the voice can be chosen from a number of different presets and then have its intonation, pitch and various other elements tweaked to your exact liking. The voice synthesis is actually very good indeed  — there's the odd word it struggles with here and there (and it doesn't understand the difference between words in all-caps and acronyms, meaning "IT" becomes "I.T.") but for the most part its pronunciation is very good, even when you make it swear.

Unusually for a Nintendo product, there are no filters of any sort on the things you can make your Mii say. This is because Miitomo, as a social app, only allows you to communicate and share with your immediate and mutual friends from other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. There's a bit of "second degree connection" in there too, because you can add people purely on the basis of having some mutual friends, and you can have discussions with people you aren't friends with in comment threads belonging to someone who is your friend, but for the most part, your experience is curated in such a way that you should theoretically only come across content from people you know — and know what to expect from.

Using Miitomo largely revolves around answering questions. When you first start the app, your Mii will ask you a few basic questions to get you started, then once you've added some friends you can hear what they had to say in response to various questions by tapping on a speech bubble with their face in that pops up. Once you've heard their answer, you can give it a heart, post a comment on it or see what other people you know had to say in response to the same question — though if you hadn't already heard their answers, you need to bribe them with sweets to get them to cough up the information.

Outside of this main social element, there's also an element of self-expression through the costume store and pachinko-esque minigame, in which you can acquire clothing and accessories for your Mii. Once suitably attired, you can then take photographs of your Mii, posing them using a number of different animations and facial expressions, then putting them on top of a background (which can be a photo from your phone instead of a preset) and adding text and other special effects.

You're rewarded in some way for everything you do. Answering and reading questions nets you coins, which can be spent in the shop or on the minigame to acquire new outfits. Missions provide you with simple things to do each day to keep you engaged, and reward you with money or game tickets for free attempts at the minigame. And you have both a "popularity" and "style" level which can be ranked up independently by interacting with other people and changing your outfit respectively.

The thing that struck me most about Miitomo is how friendly it all feels, even when your friends are posting foul-mouthed or lewd diatribes in response to seemingly innocuous questions. The fact that the Miis actually read everything you say out loud actually encourages you to consider what you're posting before you send it — at least, I felt that way, anyway — and as a result, it feels a lot more like actually engaging with real people rather than anonymous usernames and avatars.

The fact that the only way you can interact with people is through the questions that Nintendo provide for you is somewhat limiting in comparison to the total freedom of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but in a sense this is actually a positive thing: it keeps Miitomo focused on actually socialising and sharing a bit of harmless fun with friends, rather than the politically-charged grandstanding both Twitter and Facebook inevitably descend into on a regular basis. There's no links about how great/awful Donald Trump is; no indignant ill-informed op-eds about recent happenings; no cat pictures (although there is a question about cats); and no spam. Although heavily curated and somewhat restrictive in terms of what you're actually able to say to one another — though I suspect this may evolve over time, perhaps even with user-submitted questions? — Miitomo feels like the essence of what social media is supposed to be about, rather than what it typically tends to be used for these days.

I don't know whether I'll bother using Miitomo for longer than a few days, but for the moment it's a bit of harmless fun that provides an enjoyable, idle distraction when I don't have anything better to do.

The post 2264: Miitomo: Pointless, Stupid and Friendly - Exactly What Social Media Should Be appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"Go to your Stats page and check your top 3-5 posts. Why do you think they’ve been successful? Find the connection between them, and write about it."

Daily Post, February 9, 2016

All right. Let's have a look, then. Since we're not that far into 2016 and WordPress doesn't appear to have an "all time" function to search top posts, I'll provide the top five posts (excluding the homepage, which makes up the majority of pageviews but doesn't tell me much) for both 2016 so far and 2015. In other words, these are posts that people saw the title of (probably on social media or via a search engine) and directly clicked through to, rather than simply checking my front page each day.

Here's 2016 so far:

And here's 2015:

All right. So let's get analysing.

Since I write about a wide variety of topics on this blog — regular readers will know that it's my personal outlet for venting about whatever is on my mind on any given day rather than any attempt to provide a coherent editorial experience — it's perhaps not surprising that not all of the entries in these two lists have something in common, but there are a few common themes along the way.

How to Do Stuff

Let's look at 2016, first. Both How to Win at Omega Quintet and Helping your Squad in Xenoblade X were written in 2015 (indicated by them not having the orange bar next to them), yet have remained consistently popular since I wrote them. The reason for this is that they are instructional content: guides for video games. Instructions or guides are consistent traffic magnets, regardless of the subject matter of your site, because one of the most common things people search the Internet for is how to do something. Video games sites often use guide content for current popular games to attract visitors to their site and guarantee a baseline of ad revenue, then cross their fingers that readers will click through to other, less "baity" content. It doesn't always work like that, of course, which is why we've seen a rise in deliberately provocative "clickbait" content across the board, not just in games journalism.

Anyway. The reason that my guide content for both Omega Quintet and Xenoblade X proved popular is that these were both games that had a specific audience, but neither of them were "big" enough for a commercial site to want to devote time and column inches to them. In other words, those searching for help when playing Omega Quintet and/or Xenoblade X would be out of luck when searching the big video games sites, but a cursory Google search would doubtless throw up my posts here fairly early on — indeed, at the time of writing, my post on Omega Quintet appears sixth in my (admittedly personalised) Google search results, embarrassingly with a typo in the preview text which I have now corrected:

It's for this reason that a couple of my other previous posts have proven popular over time: my post on How to Play Pocket Academy, for example, detailing the baffling and frankly illogical mechanics of Kairosoft's mobile-based school sim, rode high in my rankings for quite some time. I tell you: if you want traffic, write posts that tell people how to do stuff, and preferably how to do stuff that mainstream sites haven't covered.

The Power of Sharing

My most popular posts are always several orders of magnitude more popular than their nearest rivals, with perhaps the most impressive example being 2015's An Open Letter to Paul Glass, Slimming World Consultant, Upper Shirley. This post was pretty far from my more regular subject matter on popular media, particularly video games, and yet it was my most popular individual post for 2015. Why? Because it had the absolute shit shared out of it.

Paul Glass was the consultant at our local Slimming World group when I first joined, and his enthusiasm and belief in the programme was and is a big part of why I've stuck with it and had so much success over the course of the last year — I've lost six stone in a year, hopefully with more still to come off. When he revealed that he would be leaving the group to spend more time with his family in far-off climes, I felt it important to express my feelings about what he had helped me accomplish in such a way that I could be clearly understood. I'm shy and socially anxious by nature, and at the time I wrote this I'm not sure how confident I would have felt saying all those words in person, but writing them down on paper is no big deal: I can "fire and forget" that way.

Something told me that I should probably share this post a little wider than just my Twitter followers, though, and so I decided to make one of my extremely irregular visits to Facebook to post a link to the letter on the Facebook group for the Slimming World group in question. That one simple action caused that one single post to absolutely explode in popularity, as it was shared by group members, Paul himself, and subsequently by other people I'd never met involved with Slimming World in various capacities, either as group members or staff.

You never can quite tell what the next big viral sensation is going to be, but there is one thing that all my popular posts do tend to have in common:

The Passion of the Post

It is, I feel, no coincidence that my most widely shared, most popular posts are those in which I feel most passionate about the things that I am writing about. I am a person who, I feel, can express their passion for something pretty clearly through my writing. And indeed, due to the aforementioned shyness and social anxiety mentioned above, I find writing to be the easiest means through which I can express that passion to an audience that can — hopefully — appreciate what I'm saying, or at least respect it.

2015's most popular posts were all about passion, from my letter to Paul to Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games. Four out of the five posts above were about video games — four out of the five posts were pretty much about the same thing, in fact, which was critics' regular dismissive and unfair treatment of both Japanese game developers and the fans of the games they make — but these posts all resonated deeply both with myself and with the circle of friends I've cultivated on social media, most of whom share the same interests as me.

Consequently, much as my letter to Paul got shared far and wide, so too did The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press (actually written the year before in response to an absolutely atrocious review of Fairy Fencer F on my former stomping grounds of USgamer), Some Thoughts for Critics (a response to Jim Sterling's dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2), Hi Games Journalism, It's Time We Had Another Chat (a response to Mike Diver's equally dreadful and ill-informed review of Senran Kagura 2, a game which is a ton of fun but which proved to be a whipping boy for self-described "progressive" types on the grounds of the female characters' big jiggly breasts) and the aforementioned Perhaps We Should Stop Insulting Fans of Japanese Games (a response to an extraordinarily narrow-minded editorial on USgamer by a former editor, and almost certainly the reason he has me blocked on Twitter). I saw these posts get shared and reshared, not only on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Reddit, the latter of which I don't really use myself.

The things I had written had clearly got the strength of my feelings across, and other people felt like they could relate to them in some way — either agreeing or disagreeing — and this caused them to explode in popularity, at least in terms of numbers. The same, too, can be said for 2016's Why It Would Be A Mistake to Not Localise Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, an impassioned plea for the progressive loudmouths not to stop Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki's new game making it over to Western shores.

Bovril?

I'll be honest, I have no idea why a post from 2013 about beef-and-yeast-extract black sticky substance Bovril is my third most popular post this year so far, but oddly enough this post has been consistently popular: it finished 2015 in sixth place, just after my various rants at the games journalism industry and also ranked sixth in 2014, but only managed 19th place in its original year of publication.

It's not even a particularly exciting post: it simply describes what Bovril is and how I feel about it. It doesn't even appear on the front page of Google results for Bovril. But I guess it meant something to someone somewhere. Perhaps not many people write about Bovril on the Internet, and my post offered a safe space for Bovril fans to convene and share in silent contemplation of salty beef drinks. Or perhaps it's just one of those things that can't quite be explained.

So what can we learn from this?

There are a few things you can probably see my most popular posts have in common. To my eye, these things are:

• A clear, conversational title that makes it clear what the post is about — i.e. a simple subject line rather than a "title" that tries to be clever or funny
• Passion for the subject — clear emotion, either positive or negative, is infectious and relatable
• Scope for sharing — be it a topic that a lot of people feel strongly about, or something that is written in such a way that presents a strong argument in favour of or against something
• Complete honesty — even at the expense of a few "bridges" if necessary
• Instructions on how to do stuff — particularly if nowhere else has published instructions on how to do that stuff

Not all of my most popular posts have all of the above elements — although I do make a specific effort to apply the "complete honesty" element to everything I write — but these are, by far, the most common factors that all of my most popular posts have between them.

I hope that's proved as enlightening for you as it has for me: it's certainly given me some food for thought with regard to what to write about going forward from here, so I'd say both as a writing exercise and an analytical investigation, this post has been a great success.

Thanks, Daily Post!

The post 2212: The Stat Connection appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A significant proportion of the Internet has been up in arms over a recent copyright kerfuffle on YouTube recently, where a collective I've never heard of called the Fine Bros had apparently attempted to trademark the word "react". Digging deeper, it seems that the Fine Bros had done this ostensibly as a means of trademarking the concept of "reaction videos" and allowing others to make videos in the same format — one which the group have had plenty of success with in the past — while allowing themselves an opportunity to profit from licensing fees.

Leaving aside the whole ethical implications of attempting to trademark a common word such as "react" — one of several different "brands" that Fine Bros had attempted to trademark, theoretically as a catch-all term to encompass any specific series they might concoct in the near future — this whole debacle brought one thing into sharp focus for me, and that is that there are certain aspects of modern popular culture that I simply don't understand the appeal of whatsoever.

The concept of a reaction video is simple. You show some people — preferably from a specific demographic such as "teenagers" or "the elderly" — a thing that is Shocking in some way, then you film what they do while they're watching or looking at the thing that is Shocking. Early examples of reaction videos included various instances of people seeing the notorious "2 Girls 1 Cup" video (for heaven's sake, don't Google that if you've never heard of it) as well as well-known shocking scenes from TV or online videos such as Game of Thrones' "Red Wedding" scene.

Trouble is, in the few reaction videos I've managed to stomach, it all feels so painfully forced as to not be entertaining. No-one I know whoops and hollers at the television, bellowing "OH MY GOD!" as something shocking happens. The most I do when seeing something shocking is flinch and wince at something gory, particularly if it involves eyes, but I don't shout and scream or anything. (That said, given the general difficulty I have with expressing emotions clearly when I'm "in person", I may not be the most representative example, but none of the people I know are like this either.) In other words, it doesn't seem believable, with the whole situation being so contrived as to seem utterly pointless.

And aside from the implausibility of some reactions, I simply don't see the appeal whatsoever. Why on Earth would I want to watch a group of people gathered around a TV that I can't see all screeching and gesturing at something I may or may not already be familiar with? And, by extension, why on Earth would anyone want to trademark such an utterly inane concept on the arrogant assumption that other people would want to pay them for the dubious privilege of churning out more culturally bankrupt tat like this?

I guess you can just add reaction videos to the ever-lengthening list of things that I just don't "get" in modern online life. It joins the illustrious ranks of Twitch chat, Twitch in general (unless you're hanging out with an actual friend), MOBAs, unboxing videos and doubtless a whole bunch of other things I'm not even familiar with yet.

I'm 34 years of age. Some days I feel like I'm still 16. Today, however, I'm feeling every one of those years. Now get off my fucking lawn.

The post 2203: Pete Reacts to Growing Older appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I was helpfully informed by my WordPress dashboard that there's a new WordPress app available for the desktop, so I figured I'd put it through its paces. I've used the mobile app for both iOS and Android a fair bit, so I was interested to see what benefit — if any — making use of a desktop app would have over just loading the site up in Chrome and making use of it.

Well… frankly, there's not a huge number of benefits, at least not for those who primarily make use of blogs hosted on WordPress.com. The main benefit is that the app contains the whole of the main "new-style" WordPress dashboard in local format, meaning that you can theoretically 1) use it offline and 2) write without the distractions of other browser tabs. It's also responsive to the window size, so you can scale the display according to what, exactly, you want to do with it: do you want to keep an eye on notifications, or do you want to write a full-on post?

You'll notice I pointed out that it makes use of the "new-style" WordPress dashboard, and that's an important distinction to make, because the new-style WordPress dashboard is emphatically not the same as the traditional wp-admin view. It's a lot simpler and cleaner, sure, and you can do most of the things you can do in wp-admin in the new dashboard, but there are, frankly, a number of issues that WordPress so far hasn't fixed with the main site that remain — and arguably are even more prominent — in the app.

Most notably, there are a significant number of flaws in what WordPress refers to as the "improved posting experience". Having been using this a fair amount since my initial reactions to it, I've noticed that there have been a fair few improvements and additional functions added so that now it is, roughly speaking, in line with the wp-admin-based editor. There are still some irritating factors, however, chief among them (for me) being the fact that even with the window at 1920×1080, the word counter is scrolled off the bottom of the screen so I have to manually scroll down to view it — sometimes even if my post is longer than a screen in height. This is just plain bad design, and seems to have been fixed in the Web-based editor through the use of a floating word count window in the lower right of the viewport. Apparently the locally stored version of the editor page used in the app hasn't taken this particular update on board, however; as I type this, my word count is once again disappearing out of the bottom of the viewport.

Another big flaw that requires less discussion is the fact that the Insert Hyperlink option does not include the option that the wp-admin-based editor does to search through your previous posts and link to them without having to look up the URL yourself. The absence of this from the "improved" posting experience is mildly irritating, and I have to wonder exactly why it was removed, since this is the exact opposite of an "improvement".

A few things do seem to work a little better in the standalone app, mind; when using the editor in Chrome, I've found that sometimes the cursor keys and modifiers behave in somewhat strange and unpredictable manners: sometimes attempting to move to the previous character or word with keyboard shortcuts inexplicably jumps to the end of the paragraph or somewhere completely unexpected, particularly if there a few different items of formatting (such as links or italics) used in a paragraph. So far, at the time of writing, as I type this, I've encountered no such issues — that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not there, but they shouldn't really be in there in the first place, so I've tended to assume they're a Chrome issue rather than a WordPress issue.

Since I originally looked at the "improved posting experience", too, I was pleased to discover that drag-and-drop images now work as they should: in other words, you can drag an image directly into the editor window and have it appear where the cursor was, rather than this simply being a shortcut to opening the "Add Media" window. So good job there!

Elsewhere in the app, you have access to the other features the WordPress dashboard offers, most notably site statistics and insights, allowing you to see at a glance how your most recent posts have been performing, which days you've been posting on and suchlike. The WordPress Reader system is also integrated into the app, allowing you to catch up on WordPress blogs you've subscribed to all in one place rather than having to remember to visit a bunch of sites. This is a helpful feature, but like everything else in the app, I'm not entirely convinced of the benefit of having it in a standalone app rather than just visiting the WordPress site in my browser.

All in all, then, the main benefit of the new desktop app appears to be little more than speed and a slightly more stable experience than the website under Chrome appears to offer. I suppose offline use is a benefit to those who are composing blog posts on the go using a laptop — or, indeed, catching up on downloaded Reader posts — but for me, this is some minor, not especially useful functionality, since I tend to compose my blog posts immediately before publishing them, which tends to mean that I have a stable Internet connection wherever I happen to be at the time.

I'll continue using the app for a while and see how I get on with it. If nothing else, its "distraction-free" nature due to its lack of browser tabs is quite pleasant, so it may prove to be a helpful way to concentrate, whether it's on my daily blogging "duties" or more substantial projects.

You can find out more about the app and download it for free here.

The post 2197: Putting the New WordPress App Through its Paces appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've had a whole lot of thoughts swirling around in my head for some time now about various matters, and I feel as a therapeutic exercise — not to mention an opportunity for some of you to get to know me a bit better — it's important that I express them somehow. I know all too well how frustrating, stressful and ultimately unhealthy it can be to have unresolved emotions and thoughts surrounding things that have happened to you — particularly bad things — and so this is my attempt to reboot my mind and try to move on a little.

Consequently, certain aspects of this post are more than likely to rub a few people up the wrong way. To those people whose jimmies are rustled I say simply: fuck you, I don't give a shit, and if you really cared you wouldn't have done the things you did in the first place.

In the interests of at least a facade of professionalism, I will not be naming individuals who have had a negative impact on my life in this post, though it will doubtless be extremely obvious to anyone who has been following me for a while who the people in question are. I will, however, be naming the companies involved, since that is less personal; everyone knows how unpleasant it is if you Google your own name and find something not terribly complimentary, whereas, unless you own a monolithic corporation, you probably care a little less about someone talking smack about your monolithic corporation. That's how I'm going to attempt to justify myself about this, anyway.

Also, this post is crazy long, so for the benefit of those who only read on my front page, here's a Read More tag.

Okay. The last five years. Why five years? Well, in 2010, as those of you who have been following me since then will already know, my life fell to pieces. My first marriage ended, I lost my job and I ultimately found myself moving back home to live with my parents for a while. I love my parents a great deal and I'm forever grateful for what they did for me in this particularly difficult period of my life, but I feel I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has had a taste of the freedom of living your own adult life out in the world who would relish the possibility of returning to your childhood home, however much it may have changed over the years.

While I was living at home, the depression that had been gradually consuming me for the past couple of years — ever since I'd got into teaching, found that it really wasn't for me and ultimately suffered a nervous breakdown a couple of years earlier — came to a bit of a head. Or, more accurately, it came to a head before I moved back home. I felt completely and utterly betrayed and abandoned; I'd spend days in my apartment just doing nothing, sometimes hurting myself by punching the floor so hard my hands and wrists started to ache, sometimes breaking things that reminded me of my previous life, often not getting out of bed until 5 in the afternoon having messed up my sleep schedule thanks to the stress.

There were a few lifelines at the time that stopped me going completely mental, however. I'd started writing for a small games site called Kombo — now sadly dead — and was enjoying the experience a great deal. Even better, it actually paid, though not that much. Mostly I was grateful for the virtual company writing for this site offered, and I'm still in touch with the vast majority of people I worked with there even to this day.

I also had friends who looked out for me, and I'll be forever grateful to them for listening to my woes and not judging me when I erred somewhat on the side of hysterical, which was distressingly frequent for a while.

Between those two things, it's fair to say that the darkest of the dark thoughts — the ones that would have culminated in me not being here to write this post today — were pushed back just far enough to keep me hanging on, even as I could see pieces of my life crumbling before my eyes.

Time passed, and eventually through a convoluted series of circumstances I found myself working for GamePro, the website of the magazine that my brother used to be in charge of over in the States. Working alongside British industry legend Jaz Rignall, my main contact AJ Glasser and the managing editor Jason Wilson — whom I swear did more to improve my writing in my time with GamePro than any English teacher or other editor has done since — I had a great time and did a good job covering the news beat. I successfully made GamePro's news coverage unique: instead of rehashing the same old news stories and press releases you see on all the other sites, I deliberately went out of my way to cover things that other sites didn't seem to be paying much attention to. And it worked! Page views went up, commenters appreciated the interesting articles and all looked good for a while.

I enjoyed working for GamePro. I felt like part of a team, despite that team being thousands of miles away in San Francisco. I felt like I was contributing to something good, and having the opportunity to express myself. Wilson was a great editor in particular; he allowed me the creative freedom to cover stories how I saw fit — including editorialising where appropriate — but also offered helpful, constructive feedback when necessary. I am, to this day, grateful for the opportunity I had there.

As my work at GamePro proceeded apace, I started working more and more for the site until I was effectively working full-time from home, and was on a wage that would actually allow me to move out and get my life back on track again. It was around this time that I met Andie, too — initially via Twitter and subsequently in person — and it was surprisingly quickly that we decided that yes, we wanted to live together. Andie was in a similar situation to me at the time, since she was living at home with her mother after a difficult period. Both of us were keen to get back on our feet, which could have been a recipe for disaster if we'd rushed into anything, but thankfully we were both very sure that this was what we wanted to do before we committed to anything. And now we're married. Woo.

All was well for a while. Andie worked in the local area, while I stayed at home and continued working for GamePro. Life was good, and comfortable. I was happy for the first time in quite a while. There were little blips and bumps in the road along the way, of course, but yes; for the most part, I was genuinely happy, and satisfied with what I was doing.

Sadly, the old adage about all good things proved itself to be true once again, as one morning in December I awoke to a string of panicked-sounding emails from several members of the GamePro team. None of them were making a lot of sense, but I got the impression that something bad had just happened. Sure enough, when I managed to get one of them to actually talk some sense, it seemed that GamePro's parent company IDG had decided that the site and magazine were no longer viable things to keep running, and unceremoniously booted everyone out. To add insult to injury, too, the GamePro site simply ceased to exist shortly afterwards, too; some of the content was archived on IDG stablemate PC World, but certainly not all of it by any means, so much of all our work was lost.

I was fortunate in that I'd stayed in touch with AJ Glasser after she moved on from GamePro, and had been doing some occasional freelance work for the sites she was now involved with on the side. Collectively dubbed Inside Network, the sites in question focused largely on mobile and social games, and the work I had been doing involved taking a look at various titles from a business perspective, and penning reviews of a sort about them. Being a business-facing publication, the readers were less concerned with whether these games were actually any good or not — if you've ever played a social game, you'll know that more often than not, they are absolutely not very good at all –and more interested in figures like monthly active users, daily active users and conversion rates.

It was, I'll be frank, soul-sapping work due to the ruthlessly mercenary and exploitative nature of most mobile and social games at the time, but it paid well. It paid extremely well, in fact, so I was more than happy to keep doing it for as long as I could.

You know what happens next: a string of mysterious emails from the people I'd previously been working with, then the sudden discovery that no, I don't have a job any more because, in this instance, the people who had taken over the site were complete douchebags and had sacrificed a great deal of editorial integrity — particularly from a technical perspective — in favour of getting cheap-and-cheerful articles up on the site as quickly as possible. My former colleagues wanted nothing to do with this and earnestly recommended that I jump ship as soon as I could, too.

I needed work. In desperation, I searched around in my contacts to find people I might be able to wangle some employment out of, even if it was only on a freelance basis. Former GamePro bossman Jaz Rignall eventually bore fruit when I emailed him; he promised that he had an exciting project of some description in the works, and that I was earmarked to be involved when it did launch. That project turned out to be USgamer, an addition to the Gamer Network umbrella best known for Eurogamer.

USgamer was supposed to be a different type of site. Rather than providing the usual news, previews, reviews format, all of us on staff — and, aside from me, there were a couple of other industry veterans involved, one of whom in particular I was especially excited to work alongside — we were encouraged to use our own individual voices to write about the things that interested us and were important to us. Since all of us had our own specialisms, ranging from driving simulators to retro games to niche Japanese releases (guess which one was mine), we all had different things to say, and there was a very strong feeling of "old-school 1up" about the site, with the aim being for visitors to come to USgamer for the authors, not necessarily for the articles.

It worked well for a while, but it seems that the top dogs at Gamer Network were unhappy with the traffic USgamer was pulling in. It wasn't poor by any means, but apparently it wasn't enough to make a decent amount of revenue from the advertising on the site. You know what this means, don't you? Of course: clickbait. Our original editorial remit went out of the window, and I went back to covering the news. Unfortunately, in this case I didn't have the freedom I did when I worked on GamePro, since the aforementioned person I was previously excited to work with turned out to be a bit of a control freak when it came to the content appearing on the site: I had to run each and every news story I was thinking about publishing past him, with anything he didn't deem interesting enough being rejected outright, even if I'd have plenty of time to write about it and had given an interesting angle on it.

This is not an unusual way to run a publication, of course, but it was massively inconvenient for me as the sole European employee of the site, since it meant I had to do a bunch of research before America woke up, then potentially find that my time had been completely wasted. Moreover, it made me feel like I wasn't trusted to find interesting things to write about by myself — particularly when I was outright forbidden from even mentioning certain titles such as Monster Monpiece. Even worse than that, it diluted the unique editorial voice that USgamer had, making it more and more like pretty much every other site out there on the market.

Over time, it became clear that all was not well. I chatted a bit with Rignall about the situation, since I was seeing fewer and fewer of his contributions on the site. It seemed like he was being sidelined in favour of the aforementioned veteran, despite his extensive knowledge and experience. I started to get a bad feeling about what was going on.

This bad feeling only grew when I started getting rebuked more and more for certain things I wrote, while little to no appreciation was shown for the "good" things I produced. For example, while covering the Eurogamer Expo in London — single-handedly, I might add, and churning out a whole bunch of articles each 12+ hour day — I was not praised for the variety of interesting games I covered, nor the unusual, unique angles on coverage I presented. No, instead I got bollocked for headlining an article about Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII "Lightning's More Than Just Jiggle" — a provocative headline, yes, but one that was directly poking fun at other publications who, around that time, had been focusing exclusively on the fact that the aforementioned heroine appeared to have somewhat enhanced boob-jiggle physics in her latest release. My intention was to show that there were many more interesting things to talk about when it came to Lightning Returns than whether her boobs wobbled, but no; this was around the time the whole "social justice" fad had started to rear its ugly head, and so any mention of something that might be interpreted as "objectification of women" — regardless of context — had to be censured and thrown out of the window. I changed the headline for a quiet life.

My bad feeling grew over time. Other incidents occurred. On one particularly memorable occasion, a freelance reviewer posted a review of the excellent rhythm game Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PS3 and came to the conclusion that it was for "creepy degenerates", having spend over a thousand words decrying how disgusting it was that anyone could possibly like this sort of thing. My then-colleague Cassandra Khaw and I — both of us fans of niche Japanese games — made very loud objections to our lord and master, and ultimately it was agreed that I'd be allowed to start a Japanese gaming-focused column, opening with a rebuttal to the Project Diva F review, since we all thought that changing review scores post-launch a la Polygon was somewhat bad practice.

JPgamer was born. Naturally, I got into trouble again, this time for "throwing [reviewer] under the bus", even though my article, as you'll see if you read the archive link above, was more concerned with starting a discussion rather than attempting to pretend things never happened. The thing I shouldn't have done, it seems, was apologise for the tone of the review making people uncomfortable. I would insert that ASCII shrug emote here if I could be bothered to look it up and copy-paste it.

Things quietened down for a bit after that. JPgamer drew a small but passionate audience of followers and commenters, many of whom I still speak to on occasion today, and at least one of whom I now count among my best friends. Things looked like they might be settling down for a while.

Then came the guides. Apparently top brass were still unsatisfied with the traffic USgamer was providing, so our big, new thing was to be reposting content from the Prima Games site — also part of Gamer Network, we weren't stealing content, I hasten to add — and cluttering up the main feed with multi-part guides to the big releases of the hour: at the time I was putting these together, it was stuff like Dark Souls II and Watch_Dogs.

This seemed like a desperate measure, and I became skeptical as to the long-term future of USgamer. With the guides I was tasked with rewriting, I had little time for other news coverage, reviews and previews, though I made a point to make time to write JPgamer each and every Wednesday, because it was something that had become important to both me and my readers. The magic was starting to wane, but I was hopeful the site would pull through this rough spell and we'd come out of the side happy, and perhaps even able to go back to our old editorial style.

Then came the unexpected email. I no longer had a job at USgamer — or, more accurately, I had about a month to continue working for the site and figure out what I was going to do. In the meantime, aforementioned industry veteran — whom it had become extremely apparent knew about this well in advance — recruited two of his most sycophantic cronies from back in the day, on the grounds that "the site wanted an all-American staff". This obviously spurious reason was clearly intended to make me feel better, particularly as it was combined with soulless platitudes about how it "wasn't anything to do with my work, which was consistently very good". It did not. During my last month with USgamer, I felt like the career I had been dreaming about since I was a kid — after seeing what a success my brother had made of himself in the business — was being snapped, broken, beaten with a hammer, stamped on and then shat on. I felt like my desire to be a unique voice in a business notoriously hostile towards Japanese games — particularly in recent years — had been thrown back in my face. And, not for the first time in my life, I felt utterly betrayed.

I spent some time without work, thankfully able to just about support myself until I found something new, and eventually managed to score an interview with the local offices of energy supply company SSE. This wasn't the kind of job I particularly wanted, but at least the position as Web Content Editor sounded reasonably relevant to my interests, so I went for it, and, after two separate occasions when I showed up for interview at a company who apparently had no idea I was coming — in retrospect, this should have probably sounded alarm bells, but I was more thinking "I need a job, any job" at this point — I eventually secured the position.

SSE seemed like a nice enough place populated with nice enough people initially, but it wasn't long before its incredibly obnoxious corporate culture revealed itself. SSE, being a utilities supplier, is extremely concerned with health and safety, to such a degree that you will literally get reprimanded for not holding a handrail as you ascend a set of stairs, or if you don't wear a bump cap when going under your desk to pick up a pen, or if you spill a tiny bit of water on the carpeted floor and don't immediately report it as a "hazard".

We're talking about a company that starts each and every meeting it holds — and it holds a lot of meetings — with a "Safety Moment", usually an opportunity for some apple-for-the-teacher type to chime in with some simply dreadful thing they'd seen someone driving to work do that morning. We're talking about a company that took most of its employees to a residential weekend at a very expensive-looking (but actually rather shit) hotel where, I kid you not, the bulk of our time was spent designing safety posters and colouring things in. We're talking about a company that thought it would be a good idea to divide people into groups to produce special safety-themed presentations for everyone else, like primary school children.

Despite this obnoxiousness — which I found easy enough to ignore and pay lip-service to when necessary — I didn't mind the job too much, though it was abundantly clear that the company had hired eight people to do the job of four, at best. Where things started to fall down a bit was towards the end of my probation period, when I suddenly seemed to be being picked up on a whole lot more for things that I had always been doing — most notably having a look at my phone on my desk during a quiet moment between content updating jobs which, due to the aforementioned overstaffing issue, certainly didn't fill every moment of every day.

I suffered a couple of health problems during my time at SSE, too. On one occasion, I had a week-long bout of diarrhoea that prevented me from going anywhere, and on another occasion I did something unpleasant to my back that likewise prevented me from going anywhere. The official SSE policy was that you are "allowed" to be sick up to three times in a year before you start getting reviews and meetings and all sorts of unnecessary red-tape thrown in your way, and you'll notice that this was just two separate occasions. I was rebuked for being ill, and rebuked again for not seeing the doctor during this period, even though I pointed out (accurately) that with my local surgery, it is literally impossible to get an appointment for anything closer than a week — sometimes two — from the current date.

I felt my depression rising up again. I gained a lot of weight, to such a degree that I ached and felt constant fatigue — this was my impetus to finally start Slimming World — and, as you might expect, got rebuked for displaying signs of fatigue. I was honest about how I was feeling and received little in the way of understanding from my bosses, ultimately leading them to bring me into an utterly humiliating meeting where I was supposed to have an opportunity to explain myself and convince them not to fire me, but which the conclusion of had clearly been determined well in advance.

It may not sound like a big deal, but I still have "flashbacks" to that meeting every few nights, and it gives me enormous anxiety: partly because it was a horrible experience, and partly because there are all manner of things I wish I'd said and done rather than the simple bellowed "FUCK YOU" I gave the assembled panel before I left the building for the last time.

Since that time, I worked as a seasonal temp at Game in Southampton, reminding me that I actually enjoy working retail, and that not every place of work is filled with insufferable, power-tripping wankers who want nothing more than to wave their cock (literal or metaphorical) around and make everyone else miserable. Sometimes they're filled with a group of people who enjoy what they do and do their best, even though they know it's only a temporary job for not-particularly-good pay. Sometimes they're filled with people who treat each other like human beings — having a laugh and a joke when appropriate; pulling together when necessary — and sometimes they're filled with a positive, jovial atmosphere that makes coming into work in the morning a genuine pleasure.

Of course, my temporary contract for that job ended this week, so I am faced with the unenviable prospect of having to look for work once again. Can you perhaps understand, after all that, why I'm not relishing this task, and why I find it a little difficult to trust people?

The post 2189: Reflections on the Last Five Years, Or: Life After Games Journalism appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I generally try and steer clear of Internet drama as much as possible, but sometimes it's impossible not to see what's been going on when it's all over a website you use regularly.

Most recently, Twitter has seen some interesting happenings that make it feel like the ongoing culture war between "loudmouthed, self-professed progressives (who aren't actually all that progressive at all)" and "people who just want to be left the fuck alone to talk to their friends about things they enjoy without being shamed for it" has been coming to a head. And it's been kind of fascinating to watch, particularly as the most recent happenings make one wonder what role — if any — sites that provide a means of communication, such as Twitter, have in these sort of sociopolitical debates.

The most recent drama surrounds one Milo "Nero" Yiannopoulous, a writer for the conservative/right-wing news site Breitbart. Nero is, to put it mildly, something of a controversial, divisive figure: he's brash, opinionated, flamboyantly homosexual and vehemently against the rise of "third wave" feminism — that particular ideological offshoot that we've seen in the last few years that seemingly concerns itself more with scoring "victim points" than actually promoting any sort of societal change for the better. At the same time, he's also someone who stands up for what he believes in, protective of people and groups he cares for and willing to go against the grain when he believes that the "grain" is going in the wrong direction.

I find him quite amusing to read at times. I don't follow him on Twitter, but in my occasional (non-participatory) explorations of what GamerGate subreddit KotakuInAction is up to, I tend to keep abreast of what he's been up to, and occasionally feel inclined to read some of the things he's posted on Breitbart. I don't agree with everything — many things, if I'm honest — that he says, but I do agree with some others. I find his writing entertaining to read, though, and challenging to my preconceived notions about particular issues. His writing makes me think, in other words, and contemplate how I feel about something, whether or not it's the same as what he thinks about the thing in question — and that's something that journalists should aspire to, in my opinion, wherever they are positioned on the overall political spectrum.

Anyway. The issue is with Nero's behaviour on Twitter, and with his subsequent treatment. He frequently comes under fire for "harassing" people himself, and for "inciting harassment" by drawing attention to things that people have said by using Twitter's built-in "quote and comment" functionality that they added to Retweets a while back. So strong is the backlash against him that a couple of days ago, his "verified" checkmark was removed from his Twitter account, seemingly as a punishment for the way he had behaved.

Thing is, the "verified" checkmark is not supposed to be a mark of good behaviour or anything; all it's supposed to be is an indicator that yes, this particular Twitter account is indeed the person or company that it claims to be. And Nero is Nero, no doubt about that. Taking it away for the way he has behaved on Twitter — whether or not you feel that was justified — is, frankly, insane, because it doesn't stop him being the person he is.

Naturally, as these things tend to go, the Internet reacted immediately, with a wide variety of Twitter accounts immediately rebranding themselves as "Milo Yiannopoulous" and adopting his avatar as their profile picture, making the timeline an occasionally extremely confusing place to navigate. Alongside this, the hashtag #JeSuisMilo — a reference to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag movement from around the time the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were attacked in Paris last year — was launched in an attempt to show solidarity with Nero and disapproval for Twitter's peculiar (and, as of the time of writing, unexplained) actions.

Various people, including writer and former Conservative MP Louise Mensch, did some digging and discovered the Twitter account of Michael Margolis, aka @yipe, the "engineering manager" at Twitter itself. Examining Margolis' retweets, likes and replies to people made it look to some like there were some conflicts of interest going on, with many people alleging that Margolis was inappropriately using his position at Twitter to do favours for "progressive" types — such as reporting Nero through means other than the usual channels.